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?
Yes.
First, use closed-loop systems whenever possible, so they can act independently and no data is ever collected.
Second, when closed-loop systems are not enough to provide the desired effect, only use sensors that make it physically impossible to collect data that can be disambiguated. Nothing should ever be deployed that can be used to identify an individual with a firmware or software update.
Third, if it can’t be done in either of those ways, don’t do it. There are certain conveniences that are only possible with surveillance, but they are just that, conveniences, and I think that the vast majority of “smart” things can be done in the top two ways.
This is roughly what I was going to write. For each particular thing there’s probably some way to engineer the necessary monitoring for it to work without compromising privacy. Like for the crosswalk using a very low resolution camera or using infrared sensors or something so it can only see blobs.
Creating a way for the public to verify the hardware/software could also probably be engineered for a lot of things but would obviously require people to care enough to audit.