I have not gotten around to figuring out which one is mine or a good way to system to store/display the data but I certainly can read the date.
In the grand scheme of things it is a minor to medium security flaw, power usage could be used to infer which houses contain valuable items and when people are home. I'd say medium at most since a lot of other things Visible curbside indicate this as well (lights, cars in the driveway, etc.). On the other hand, electronics are pretty efficient. A wealthy house with all the lights on is still using less electricity than a small apartment using an electric stove. But I guess if you were really interested in stealing electric cars then it would be really useful.
I imagine it depends on location, but there are places where it's wide open.
"Using a cheap RTL-SDR, it didn’t take long for [k-roy] to tap into this transmission and stumbled across the power readings for his entire neighborhood using a simple command"
Sometimes they are. I gave up on playing with my water meters because of it; my RTL-SDR can pick them, alright, but I checked the manufacturer docs, and the meters encrypt the datastream.
