Abstract Smart meters are automated devices that can exploit to monitor the real-time electricity consumers’ power consumption. The smart grid with key technological enablers are considered as the collected information consumption that would useful for enabling the real-time schemes of new sophisticated billing. A wide-variety of value-added services could rise and the power distribution system’s efficient operations could facilitate. As the meters can collect the consumers’ sensitive data, the information of energy consumption is provided. For data collection, a prime challenge and a major concern is considered as privacy. In this paper, the metering data with different applications in the smart grid and the reviewing of relevant privacy legislation are made. The research implications, suggestions, structured overview, and defects of security solutions have been demonstrated for effective management and data delivery of privacy-preserving meter data. To collect the meter-data for three application areas such as 1) value-added services; 2) operations; and 3) billing including demand response, recent works on privacy-preserving technologies for collecting meter data have been investigated in this paper.