Page 744 - Shaping smarter and more sustainable cities - Striving for sustainable development goals

Table 9 – Anonymized medical record (2)

Birth Gender Problem

1970 Male cold
1970 Male obesity
1970 Male diabetes

198* Human diabetes
198* Human obesity
198* Human diabetes
198* Human cold

8.3 Application of anonymization method for smart metering

Recently, owing to the evolution of cloud services, discussion of secondary uses of data has attracted
attention, especially for big data. However, preserving privacy is a significant problem. As a typical
application, here we have focused on demand response services in a smart grid as a promising
application of smart sustainable city.

The introduction of a smart meter has been considered and achieved around the world. It manages
the energy use of a home to achieve a balance between energy saving and a comfortable lifestyle.
Smart meters have a communication function to transmit the electric power consumption of a
household at regular intervals. The primary use of smart meters is for fare correction. In this case,
power consumption data should be collected without loss of data. This means that private
information is included in the data.
Demand response (DR) is a typical application of the secondary use of electric power consumption
data measured by a smart meter. DR can achieve peak‐cut and peak‐shift of electricity use by
changing the price of electricity or by providing incentives to encourage customers to change their
normal consumption pattern when demand for electric power is high. Variable pricing may
encourage consumers to reduce electricity consumption and will provide an opportunity to think
more about how and when we use electricity. Electric companies or aggregators create DR messages
to households according to their current electric power demand. An operation test conducted in
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the United States demonstrated electric power demand reduction of 10‐20% . DR can be achieved
using electric power consumption data transmitted from residential smart meters.

As an example of DR, electric power consumption will be used widely for secondary use due to its
flexibility in applications. The cost of introducing smart meter and devices to control home electric
appliances is comparatively higher than the reduction cost of electricity by itself. DR services use a
smart meter, which is an electric power meter with a communication function to transmit the
electric power consumption of a household to a datacenter. This power consumption data can be
used to develop and exploit new services. Recently, secondary use of such data has been considered
for such services. DR services are not only for electric companies that collect raw data from smart
meters. For other companies, collecting private information with such meters is prohibited. To avoid
disclosing private information, it is sufficient for such companies to use generalized or anonymized
data if the quality of their services can be guaranteed. However, as described in section 7, electric
power consumption data must be treated with significant care. An anonymizing method for electric

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69 Yuichi Nakamura, Kanae Matsui and Hiroaki Nishi; Anonymization Infrastructure for Secondary Use of Data;
ICOMP'14 ‐ The 2014 International Conference on Internet Computing and Big Data, 2014.

734 ITU‐T's Technical Reports and Specifications