Recent Graduate Quinn Educates PUC on Privacy Considerations Implicated by Smart Grid Technologies

Hard work during the school year has real-world applications for a Colorado Law School recent graduate.

In the fall of 2008, Elias Quinn ’09 completed a seminar paper for Professor Paul Ohm’s Information Privacy seminar on privacy considerations implicated by smart grid technologies. A smart grid is a power grid managed by specialized computer programs that collect data from consumers to deliver electricity from suppliers efficiently. It is designed to save energy, reduce cost and increase reliability of the energy supply.Quinn’s early research illustrates how information gathered through these technologies can be used to gather intimate details of a consumer's daily life and potentially invade their privacy. He examined the adequacy of existing protections for such information, concluding that current regulations need to address this new privacy threat.

Quinn subsequently worked with Professor Brad Bernthal and continued to develop his research in the spring of 2009 while he was a student in the Samuelson-Glushko Technology Law & Policy Clinic. As part of his outreach and final project for the clinic, Quinn met with the Colorado Public Utility Commission (PUC) on September 15 to share his conclusions about the competing policy issues surrounding the development of the smart grid, including supporting technology innovations while protecting consumer privacy. Quinn also made recommendations for regulating the consumer information gathered by the smart grid. The result is that the Colorado PUC has used his paper as the framing document to open an investigatory docket addressing the privacy consequences of smart grid deployment. Read Quinn's paper, "Smart Metering & Privacy: Exising Law and Competing Policies."

Quinn will be speaking to the Colorado Bar Association's Communications and Technology Law section