Ontology-based User Privacy Management in Smart Grid

A smart grid system is one of the most complex cyber-physical systems consisting of power generation, distribution, consumption, customer domains, and millions of connected end devices. The widespread implementation of the smart grid raises concerns about the privacy of the data it collects. Since users' personal and nonpersonal data are going to be accessed by different entities involved in the smart grid and by third parties, the privacy concern can be a big obstacle in the adoption of the smart grid among people. Hence, there is an urgent need to provide the user with a privacy solution to support selective sharing of their usage data with different entities. In this paper, we propose an ontology-based user privacy management approach that will enable the user to release their data based on sensitivity and privacy factors, thus making an informed privacy decision on their usage data sharing. Green Button Initiative is a smart grid application that allows users to download and share their energy usage data with third parties. We present a proof-of-concept implementation extending the Green Button Initiative to test the feasibility of the proposed approach. Lastly, we discuss the results of a user study to investigate the effectiveness of our proposed approach.