Smart Meters By Domestic Households Receiving: The Weight of the Privacy Controversy

This communication proposes to explore the links between digital technologies and social life based on the analysis of the controversy around smart meters for the protection of personal data. It is based on investigative work conducted among homes with meters Linky (50 interviews and observations at home) on the territory of Lyon. The smart meter Linky is the object of an industrial program designed the installation of 35 millions meters from here to 2020 in France. The installation of smart meters is accompanied by heated controversy. These controversies are a plurality of issues - health, ethical, economic, safe and environmentally friendly (Danieli, 2016). The results of previous research conducted in North America (Hess, 2014) attributed to the health concern structuring scope in the controversy over smart meters. In France, the question of health play a structuring role in the media coverage of the controversy Linky, including under the leadership of associations and groups campaigning for the protection of electrosensitive people (Draetta, Tavner, 2017). It appears that the controversy surrounding the protection of privacy take certain categories of domestic customers via the contestation of its intrusive nature or ecological efficiency, dimensions that echo the 'energy project' homes (Caron, Durand-Daubin, 2015).The installation of the meter is experienced as an intrusion into a space intimate by customers (often housed in collective housing and belonging to the small lower middle classes) is recognizing in an energy project focused on comfort and individual freedom. The controversy surrounding the protection of privacy is another category of customers defending a sober energy and digital project (middle classes is sensitive to the issues of environment and health). It is in the social life is rooted the adoption or the challenge of digital technologies and make sense debates, such as the protection of privacy that accompany their dissemination.