The reason we no longer have those old fashioned meters of our youth, under the stairs and always wiffy of gas is because over the 70 years or more of my life, at least, meters have regularly been upgraded. In almost every house I have lived in over the last 50 years, at sometime for some reason meters have been replaced with more up to date ones, fuse boards have been replaced by consumer units. That is improvement in technology.
Smart meters are just the next generation of meters that will enable electricity and gas companies to read our meters without having to get into the house or rely on estimates. Three cheers and hooray. I say.
Every technology, including the wheel has downsides, wheels kill people if they roll the wrong way or too fast, with or wothout a propulsion unit.
Energy suppliers already have complete control of your energy supply. They can cut you and others off, in the road, at the substation or even further up the chain. It just needs a man with a van. We frequently have short outages and I have to go and reset the oven clock. The power supply can be hacked whether you have a smart meter or whether you do not.
Most of us have wifi in our houses, mobile phones, televisions, computer equipment, DH has medical equipment that communicates by wifi, plus burglar alarms and other wire free equipment. Having a smart meter is going to have little effect on anyone who already has a household of those devices.
Obviously if you are not in the electronic world there could be some glitches and other specific technical glitches others have mentioned with power supply and solar panels
The Early smart meters did only work with the company that installed it, but the 2nd generation meters now being installed can be transferred from supplier to supplier.
I think I have smart meter as our meter was moved and, I think, replaced at the end of last year. But to be honest i do not really understand why there is such a song and dance about these meters.