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Sense Home Energy Monitor

Sense Labs · Smart Meter

Staff Reviewed — a person at DeSpy reviewed this rating.

4.5Surveillance
Index
Policy — what its policy permitsD
Evidence — what research provesC

Generates hypotheses about specific devices in use from detailed wattage and voltage data, sharing information with Meta for ad measurement and targeting and not honoring Do Not Track.

Why this rating

Sense generates hypotheses about specific in-home devices from detailed wattage data and shares information with Meta for ad measurement and targeting, and does not honor Do Not Track — an unusually direct ad-tech pipeline for an energy monitor.

What it is

Manufacturer
Sense Labs
Category
Smart Meter
Model years
2016-present
Market status
Current
Companion app
Sense

The evidence 1

Independent research, regulatory action, lawsuits and journalism about how this device handles personal data — the "what actually happens" axis. Each links to its source.

  1. S3Sam Franceschetti / Northeastern MonIoTr Lab — IMC 2019 IoT Traffic Study
    Measurement study · Northeastern University MonIoTr Lab · 2019-01-01

    Academic measurement study analyzing network traffic from thousands of IoT devices, revealing extensive undisclosed third-party data flows.

    Why it matters here: Northeastern MonIoTr Lab's IoT traffic study is directly relevant to home energy-monitor data flows.

Where your data goes

Third parties this device's data has flowed to, and on what basis. An ended tag means the flow has verifiably stopped — it stays listed for the record.

Are you the maker? Respond to this finding

Free. There is no paid or faster path, and nothing about a rating is for sale. Prove you control your company's domain with one DNS record; a person then reads your statement beside our finding and decides whether to publish it.

An email is encrypted at rest and opened only to answer you; it is erased 30 days after we resolve this (or 180 days if still open), and you can erase it sooner. Unproven filings are deleted after 14 days.

Think something here is wrong?

Evidence and research improve when people push back. Tell us what to re-check — a misattributed domain, an outdated classification, a claim about your own app — and a human will review it. Responses can take up to 30 days.

If you leave an email it is encrypted at rest and opened only to answer you — never shared, never used for anything else. It is erased 30 days after we resolve this (or 180 days if it is still open) without you asking, and you can erase it sooner at any time; either way your correction stays, anonymously. Leave it blank and your request is fully anonymous from the start (we store no IP address either way).

Descriptive, cited, not legal advice; ratings are versioned and corrections create a new version. Data from the IoT Info Grabber DB research project, CC BY-SA 4.0.

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