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?
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.
Stabby, I just wanted to say, I saw your original comment, and was going to side with you - I don’t think it’s feasible to avoid surveillance. I also wanted to say that the way this conversation touches on all the points I thought about ‘drafting’ my comment in my head, so it was really great to read.
While you can have reasonably dumb sensors (like motion lights in our house, but y’know in a city application), anything beyond that gets really challenging to use without compromising privacy, or becomes a tremendous pain the ass if we give a shit about privacy. Having a bajillion sensors all not talking to each other, or talking to each other through numerous layers creates a data management nightmare. it’s why you don’t get a bunch of technical experts to write several different parts of a report, for instance. You need one main author to go through and make it all sound the same and the parts to speak to each other. Same goes with data. Because of that need, you open yourself up to all that data/surveillance being compromised by 3rd parties or abused by governments, as you point out.
Yeah this is a tricky one. Modern gold standards are to use cameras to recognize pedestrians and cyclists to give them intersection priority. This is a big benefit if designed properly but video data this way poses a huge privacy/surveillance risk.
I suppose maybe there would be a way to process the footage locally and delete it as soon as it’s no longer needed but that’s going to require a lot of oversight from the community to confirm.