Do you want people to know when you're at home? Fairly easy to do from electricity or water usage patterns. Supposedly only the utility supplier would have that information, but they are so incompetent at security, who knows who else? Certainly the police have access to that. Looks like a sensible security measure to avoid that exposure.

> [...] You can save a lot of power by knowing what is going on [...]

I'm really curious how you go from "smart meter" to "save a lot of power". Just because I have a smeter, I won't save money. My regular meter already shows power consumption (not that convenient, that's true) and my smart meter won't tell me what actually uses my power. So, regarding saving power, it's the same as with a regular meter?

How do you save energy by having a smart meter?

I miss the point of those "advantages" - so what if I know how much water my guests used? Should I run over them in the bathroom and stop them from flushing? Should I let people only come in summer, and tell them to bring their own batteries? Should I stop having guests at all? All because the smart meter told me they pee at noon? And same for my usual electricity usage. I know what I have running and I know what I should shut down, I'm living in this house right. Not like some device sneaks on me and plugs itself in when I doze off. Ok, when I become a solar producer I will probably be helped by smarted devices, but until then I'm totally missing the point.

> Why would you refuse if you can get detailed information out of a smart meter about your usage?

Why would you block ads when you can get "relevant" information on what to buy and consume?

The same asymmetric relationship exists here: the power company gets a lot more benefits from this system than you do, in fact it may even be at your detriment and no one cares.

Or they will estimate the monthly bill, and send meter readers less often than once a month.

In Scotland yes but most most of England and Wales no; the latter used O2’s 2/3g even for new SMETS2 meters.