As a nerd, I get you think it was the main problem.
But most people didn't care about that.
The main contenders were:
- Linky calculates my electricity bill badly. It was in fact more accurate, but sometimes it meant a raise in bill.
- Linky emits dangerous radiation or magnetism. That was, of course, a total hoax.
- Linky didn't allow me to cheat on my bill anymore (lots of people around me were hacking their meter to pay less).
- Linky is forced on us by Big Electricity. So it's bad.
The privacy thing is legit, but all those people had full facebook accounts, most of them had full sync on their smartphone, use chrome without an adblock, and so on.
Only geeks like us really care about the privacy aspect.
On the other hand, it's a greener solution:
- Less people in cars to check meters.
- Live load balancing on the power grid.
- Clear consumption stats so that you can optimize your own bill.
So the linky, which eventually got into most homes, is deployed with success.
But it took so many years because of the pushback.
Eventually, if the pushback would have been just about the privacy, we could have focused on fixing that and would have had a cheaper, faster deployment, with privacy.
We had the worst: expensive, long deployment, and the privacy invasion is still in place.
