You think this only happens in north america?
I’m pretty sure that would be illegal in the EU at least, as your living circumstances qualify as personal data.
And the whole idea (and OPs indifference to it) is just such an ultra-capitalist thing that it is hard to imagine happening anywhere else than in the US.
(ok, so not everywhere in North America, but that’s true for most posts here)I was a power engineer for a municipal utility, non-profit government entity, they don’t have shareholders or profits, the cost to provide the service is the cost of the service. This is not a capitalist thing, this is an engineering thing. They have to estimate the power demand of their customers to efficiently size the power equient and forecast power generation requirements. Them having this information lowers the cost for all customers. Do you expect them to guess if you need 100A or 200A service?
I just tell the power company that I want 60A service, pay for it and then they deliver it. It’s none of their business if I use the 40kW to resistance-heat my home or cool down my superconductors, light my weed plantation or melt my own steel.
They really don’t care what you do with your power, they absolutely do not give a shit what you do. They just need the info to estimate the demand for infrastructure at the time they turn the power on, if you are an outlier they don’t really care as long as you don’t create problems for the system.
60A service
40kW to resistance-heatLol, good luck with that.
They just need the info to estimate the demand for infrastructure at the time they turn the power on
But that’s exactly what the previous commenter was getting at.
The square footage is completely useless for that estimate.
They need a load value in Ampere and that is depending not on size but on other factors that the builder of the home or the home owner is much better qualified to estimate than the local supplier is.
And the electric company that later actually sells you the electricity doesn’t even need to know the load value of the house, but only the address and meter ID.
The square footage is incredibly useful for estimating the average demand for similar sized units. They are almost always going to have the same basic appliances and heating and cooling, or close enough that it averages out. The demand for a larger unit will be more than for a smaller unit, mostly because they will need a larger HVAC or heater but also because there are more rooms, occupants, stuff plugged in. So we establish an average demand profile for homes of similar size groups.
And the electric company that later actually sells you the electricity doesn’t even need to know the load value of the house, but only the address and meter ID.
They absolutely need to know the demand of each unit, if another home off the same feed is built later or upgrades their service they need to know if the existing capacity is sufficient or if components need to be upgraded.
They absolutely need to know the demand of each unit, if another home off the same feed is built later or upgrades their service they need to know if the existing capacity is sufficient or if components need to be upgraded.
No they don’t.
This information is only relevant for the local provider that physically connects to your home, not for the company selling you the elecricity.
But I increasingly get the feeling that you don’t have a free electricity consumer market in the US?
That would actually come as a surprise to me, but would explain some of the comprehension problems that l have seen and experienced myself in this thread.
60A * 230V * 3 Phases = 41,400W
Greetings from Europe ;-)
Here that’s done not by the electricity provider but by the planer of the building who just requests the connection load, so the provider can make then sure the infrastructure (cables, transformers) is ready for it.
The provider knows nothing except this requested load value.
And the local provider is in most cases not even the electricity company actually selling you the electric energy.
This company doesn’t even know the load value of the estate, let alone such specific things as living area of appartments within it.
Do real estate listings not include square footage on them?
Of course not, that would be a privacy violation. They only share floor plans with square meterage. It’s more private because the scraping tools don’t like unit conversions.
Do real estate listings not include square footage on them?
Well, yes (but square meters, naturally), but not the address.
So scraping would also be pointless.Are real estate listings in the US published with the address visible?
Well, yes (but square meters, naturally), but not the address.
Maybe a dumb question, how do you post a house for sale without the address. How would potential buyers know where it was located?
Also just to add to the conversation, in the US at least all properties are registered with the government for tax purposes. And all that information is public.
So you don’t even need to scrap real estate listing. You can just get it from the county for free.
How would potential buyers know where it was located?
Well, an advert would e.g. be like:
“Nice, quite home located in Friedrichshain district, contact for details and to schedule a viewing”in the US at least all properties are registered with the government for tax purposes.
Same at least here in Germany.
important difference is, this real estate tax information is not publicly available.
And only the tax office of the local government has access, even other branches of the government don’t.So in the US this information is available for transparency.
If the government is charging you x dollars a year for your property taxes you can confirm that other similar properties are paying the same/similar rates.
Also for home buying you can confirm the tax rate on the property with the government before buying.
I’m guessing your system is either less prone to manipulation from the government or you all are just more trusting.
Even with this transparency I personally know multiple people who have been able to prove the government was over charging them on their property taxes.
Here the formula used to calculate the real estate taxes is public instead (I take it from your comment that in the US it isn’t?), so you don’t have to reengineer it looking at other sample values.
And when buying you just ask the seller, they have to provide such kind of information.
It’s absolutely legal for a power company to know where their services are delivered, lol. Pretty sure they at the minimum absolutely need to know the connection ID that would uniquely identify your house and apartment. Not so sure that a generic info like rooms and square footage would even be considered personal data.
Also, based on the other thread I think you would have an aneurysm if you knew how much info is publicly available in Sweden.
you would have an aneurysm if you knew how much info is publicly available in Sweden.
Would have guessed it to be similar to Germany, but Germans are often… special… in that regard.
And l just remembered we have our own private nightmare data gatherer here in Germany, too.
It is called “Schufa” and basically every financial institution, online seller or insurance company transmits them your financial behaviour to be centrally evaluated to generate a credit score.
Still can’t comprehend how this is legal to exist…
My German utility company comes into my (rented) apartment every year to look at the heating units inside my home in person. My town just combines it with the Schornsteinfeger/fire marshal visit, which is pretty convenient, but I was a little shocked that I was required to let people into my home at first.
That’s true and would have been complicated to avoid up to now.
Thankfully technology has caught up here and the visits often aren’t necessary any more due to RF meters (but at the price of raising a whole new bunch of questions about privacy in the process…)
Schornsteinfeger, like car TÜV, you won’t get around, though.
I mean they aren’t even scraping it (the vast majority of which is publicly available), you just buy it: regrid.com
Its far more convenient to buy parcel data from a data provider like regrid, because they do all the harmonization for you, and most county assessors offices are shit at keeping their shit straight.
And if you are cheap, it took me 15 seconds to get to this for Sonoma county: https://gis.sonomacounty.ca.gov/datasets/4b231e8ffbac47abb9a78296e550ffa1/explore?location=38.480199%2C-122.942214%2C10
Also in terms of the reactionary response… Its all a matter of public record and is legally required to be so? Property taxes are all levied at a state/ county level, its how we fund those governments. So its disclosure is usually a legal requirement, even if the county makes it a pain in the ass (see this lawsuit involving santa clara county in California). Do a quick search for “[some county] county assessor office GIS data” and you’ll almost instantly be brought to a link for parcel data for all the properties in a county.
You can also buy imagery for just about anywhere: https://vexceldata.com/
Just… I don’t know why people think details about the structure they live in would be secret information, when the government (and quasi governmental monopolies like power companies) are legally required to both gather and make available that information.
quasi governmental monopolies like power companies
Question, as I think it is relevant to part of the confussion I’ve seen here:
You don’t have a free electric market? Meaning you can’t choose which company supplies you with electricity?
Much like ai they have it but don’t really seem to be able to utlize it with understanding. I have electric heat and it lists us using so much more energy than neighbors in the winter than summer. It claims its comparing me to nieghbors with the same setup but its pretty obvious its not.
It also helps that every house in the US is about 30 years old max because they build them out of plywood and tissue paper and they fall down as soon as there’s a mild storm. So the records are always up to date.
You guys really should learn about this new building technique called bricks.
