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?
This begs the question, would it be possible in a world without politicians? In an anarchist society, for example, where capitalism and the state have been abolished, could there be a technologically-advanced “smart city” that did not violate anyone’s privacy? I think that that is the more interesting question. In the world as it is today, of course this would not work.
I think not violating people’s privacy with technological data collection is a technological issue, not a political one. Because you can have a society without capitalism or the state, you can have incredibly strong social norms governing privacy and the use of people’s data, but as long as that society is collecting and storing information about individual people, that information can still be leaked, stolen, or misused by whoever controls it.
(I mean, imagine somebody in smart city IT has some sort of personal issue or conflict with another citizen and decides to abuse their access to data collection to gather information about that citizen. Even in an anarchist utopia we’d still have stalkers, domestic violence, controlling partners, child custody disputes, and all the ways people in relationships hurt each other that come with humans being human.)
The only way to guarantee data collection doesn’t violate people’s privacy is to not collect data capable of violating people’s privacy - that is, don’t deploy systems that can collect that data at all.
And that restricts the type of data that can be collected so much that, I think, it rules out most of the benefits of a “smart city”.
It is both a technological and a political issue. The technology would need to be designed in such a way as to not collect “sensitive” data about anyone and to anonymise whatever data needs to be collected. This would not be simple to implement in a way that would prevent abuse, but the example of a motion sensor rather than a video camera would be the sort of thing that I imagine. To what extent a “smart city” could be developed using only privacy-respecting technology, I don’t know, but at least some options do exist.