The trust gap: Social perceptions of privacy data for energy services in the United Kingdom

The integration of distributed renewable resources relies increasingly on ‘smart’ solutions, requiring data to schedule, control and plan the operation of distributed assets within future energy systems. Such data can include household and even personal information. Personal location data can give valuable insights with relevance for energy consumption. Movement patterns and occupancy states help with scheduling of appliances, heating loads or storage, and other applications may yet emerge. Many smart home business models rely on data for their service provision. The potential upsides from the use of personal location data are met with growing concerns over information privacy. We present results from a representative UK survey on attitudes towards location data sharing. Our findings suggest that many of the resulting service benefits are widely appreciated. However, trust in the organisations delivering them is low and may inhibit their uptake. Less than 20% of people are were willing to share their location data with an energy utility. In addition, the sense of control over location data appears low. Only 15% claim to understand who had access to their location data and 70% of participants feel that these settings are outside their control. These findings pose challenges for policy and regulation of data access. We make policy recommendations that seek to ensure smart solutions are not inhibited by a lack of public trust. In some cases this may require default settings that better match public expectations of data sharing defaults