You’re right in that it’s a useful tool for various kinds of abuse, but so is almost every useful home automation/home security sensor.
The most obvious/useful use cases I can see are:
- turn on bedroom lights when the last person gets out of the bed
- turn off whole house lights when the last person gets into bed.
Both should be easy with load cells under the bed legs but rather difficult otherwise.
(Useful assuming a household of two adults in one bed that is).
As long as the punishment is fair and not unduly harsh, I don’t see any real problem with criminalising misinformation in general. It’s already illegal to lie about facts in a great many contexts (e.g. fraud, perjury), and reasonable people don’t have a hugely difficult time distinguishing a fact from an opinion.
As a trivial example: “This is mine and you can have it for a dollar” is not an opinion someone can be entitled to, it is a statement of fact that is either true or not.