By Ken Macon – Reclaim The Net
California’s experiment in using household electricity data for police surveillance has come to an abrupt end.
A Sacramento County judge has ruled that the Sacramento Municipal Utility District (SMUD) violated state privacy law by sharing detailed smart meter data with law enforcement, a practice that exposed hundreds of thousands of residents to suspicionless monitoring.
You may remember learning about what SMUD was doing from our report this summer.
We obtained a copy of the ruling for you here.
This ruling is a significant blow against a surveillance partnership that operated for more than a decade under the guise of drug enforcement.
The court found that SMUD’s cooperation with police ran afoul of California Public Utilities Code Section 8381, a statute designed to protect the confidentiality of customers’ electrical consumption data.
That law allows only narrow exceptions for data disclosure. SMUD had instead given police wide access to its database, letting officers comb through granular records that revealed hour-by-hour patterns of home energy use.
According to filings in the case, the Sacramento Police Department routinely asked SMUD to identify “high usage” homes that might indicate indoor cannabis cultivation.
SMUD complied, scanning through the records of roughly 650,000 customers and forwarding over 33,000 names to police for further scrutiny. The court determined that these repeated, wide-ranging searches could not be justified as legitimate investigations.
“[T]he process of making regular requests for all customer information in numerous city zip codes, in the hopes of identifying evidence that could possibly be evidence of illegal activity, without any report or other evidence to suggest that such a crime may have occurred, is not an ongoing investigation,” the ruling stated.
The court concluded that SMUD had violated its “obligations of confidentiality” by assisting police in this way and ordered the utility to end all such data sharing.
EFF, along with attorneys from Vallejo, Antolin, Agarwal, and Kanter LLP, brought the case on behalf of three petitioners: the Asian American Liberation Network, Khurshid Khoja, and Alfonso Nguyen.
Their filings argued that the program not only criminalized innocent people but also led to hostile encounters with law enforcement and disproportionate targeting of Sacramento’s Asian community.
The ruling acknowledged that the relationship between SMUD and the police had grown far beyond what the law allows.
It all started as a utility’s effort to help with drug enforcement and evolved into a standing surveillance arrangement that treated private households as potential crime scenes.
The court’s findings also highlight how “smart” utility infrastructure, when repurposed for policing, can quietly transform into a powerful form of domestic surveillance capable of revealing when residents are awake, at work, or asleep.
Despite finding a violation of state privacy law, the court declined to recognize the program as an unconstitutional search under Article I, Section 13 of the California Constitution. It reasoned that sharing a customer’s monthly energy total did not amount to an unlawful search or seizure.
Attorneys for the petitioners have disagreed, arguing that the program depended not on monthly totals but on continuous access to high-resolution data that effectively mapped activity inside people’s homes.
The ruling, which follows a preliminary decision from October 2025, sends a message to utilities across California: energy data gathered to provide a public service cannot be turned into a policing tool without a clear legal basis.
The court’s order stops SMUD from sharing customer information with law enforcement unless there is concrete evidence to justify such a request.