I'm sure future smart (snitch) power meters will be able to detect when you have such devices running (by their power signature), and fine you automatically.
Just add a ‘smartifier’ between the plug and outlet.
Definitely there would/will be such devices, though illegal of course. They might have some capacitors or inductors to shift the motor's power factor to 1.0 so it doesn't give itself away.
That’s a dark thought.
Its already possible. Just not implemented (yet) on a large scale. You would be surprised how easy it is to figure out what devices are running in a house if you can simply just monitor the ground line. There was a interesting paper about a decade ago on how you could tell what was being typed on a computer by monitoring the ground line. I think this was just for PS2 based devices, not the now-norm USB devices.
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