Fisher Information as a Measure of Privacy: Preserving Privacy of Households With Smart Meters Using Batteries

In this paper, batteries are used to preserve the privacy of households with smart meters. It is commonly understood that data from smart meters can be used by adversaries to infringe on the privacy of the households, e.g., figuring out the individual appliances that are being used or the level of the occupancy of the house. The Cramér-Rao bound is used to relate the variance of the estimation error of any unbiased estimator of the household consumption from the aggregate consumption (i.e., the household plus the battery) to the Fisher information. Subsequently, optimal policies for charging and utilizing batteries are devised to minimize the Fisher information (in the scalar case and the trace of the Fisher information matrix in the multi-variable case) as a proxy for maximizing the variance of the estimation error of the electricity consumption by adversaries (irrespective of their estimation policies). The policies are chosen to respect the physical constraints of the battery regarding capacity, initial charge, and rate constraints. The results are demonstrated on real power measurement data with non-intrusive load monitoring algorithms.