  With the development and introduction of smart metering, the energy
information for costumers will change from infrequent manual meter readings to
fine-grained energy consumption data. On the one hand these fine-grained
measurements will lead to an improvement in costumers' energy habits, but on
the other hand the fined-grained data produces information about a household
and also households' inhabitants, which are the basis for many future privacy
issues. To ensure household privacy and smart meter information owned by the
household inhabitants, load hiding techniques were introduced to obfuscate the
load demand visible at the household energy meter. In this work, a
state-of-the-art battery-based load hiding (BLH) technique, which uses a
controllable battery to disguise the power consumption and a novel load hiding
technique called load-based load hiding (LLH) are presented. An LLH system uses
an controllable household appliance to obfuscate the household's power demand.
We evaluate and compare both load hiding techniques on real household data and
show that both techniques can strengthen household privacy but only LLH can
increase appliance level privacy.
