How viable is to have the benefits of smart cities without all the surveillance apparatus that comes with it in the actual state of the technology and politics?
How viable is to have the benefits of smart cities without all the surveillance apparatus that comes with it in the actual state of the technology and politics?
One aspect of a “smart city” is a system to constantly monitor a lot of data streams about its residents and use that data to allocate the city’s resources more efficiently in real time or better plan future upgrades to city infrastructure.
This obviously raises a lot of surveillance concerns. Some of it could be done in a manner that respected people’s privacy, with, for instance, extensive algorithmic anonymization of data and strict limits on what data is permanently recorded, but that requires a lot of trust and oversight and, I think, the benefits are likely not worth the risk of having that data collection system in place.
Another aspect of a smart city is enhanced local participation through e-governance, making it easier for people to know about, suggest, and weigh in on policies impacting their homes and communities. This aspect could be implemented without any kind of surveillance apparatus and has some appealing qualities imho.
So, you know, it depends on what benefit you’re talking about.
As for the collecting data. It can be done, if the right sensors are used. For example a movement or magnet sensor to trigger a traffic light or weight sensors to measure how full train cars are. If a city has fare gates, those might be used to count usage as well.
Also open source code for public infrastructure would go a long way to help with that.
Open source code for public infrastructure is extremely important, I agree. But it’s not sufficient. If data about individual people is collected by a smart city at all, or even capable of being collected by the hardware the smart city deploys, no matter what the laws are around it or how much you trust the current government, it could be exploited by a future, less ethical government, or stolen by third parties.
I think the examples you gave would be good ways to gather data for smart city management without collecting data about individual people that could be misused, but the way surveillance is implemented now, that sort of data collection is dangerous.
For example, a sensor that triggers a traffic light is great, but currently just about every major intersection in every major city in the US already has license plate cameras for traffic enforcement. So any smart city program is going to incorporate those license plate cameras, because why would they spend money installing new sensors when they already have perfectly good cameras? And then those cameras will be used for police and immigration enforcement and other privacy violating data collection even more efficiently than they’re already being used.