Privacy concerns in smart cities

an article by Liesbet van Zoonen (Erasmus University Rotterdam, Netherlands) published in Government Information Quarterly Volume 33 Issue 3 (July 2016)

Highlights

• Discussion of arguments for including people’s privacy concerns in research, policy and design of smart cities.
• Thorough review of current research about people’s privacy concerns and the paradoxes that typify them.
• People’s concerns are shown as structured by how they perceive city data, and for which purpose they feel this data is used.
• Framework to assess if and how specific technologies and data-usage in smart cities will evoke people’s privacy concerns.
• Clear directions for further academic research about people’s privacy concerns in smart cities.
• Sensitizing instrument for policymakers and operational managers about privacy concerns among their citizens.

Abstract

In this paper a framework is constructed to hypothesize if and how smart city technologies and urban big data produce privacy concerns among the people in these cities (as inhabitants, workers, visitors, and otherwise). The framework is built on the basis of two recurring dimensions in research about people's concerns about privacy: one dimensions represents that people perceive particular data as more personal and sensitive than others, the other dimension represents that people's privacy concerns differ according to the purpose for which data is collected, with the contrast between service and surveillance purposes most paramount.

These two dimensions produce a 2 × 2 framework that hypothesizes which technologies and data-applications in smart cities are likely to raise people's privacy concerns, distinguishing between raising hardly any concern (impersonal data, service purpose), to raising controversy (personal data, surveillance purpose).

Specific examples from the city of Rotterdam are used to further explore and illustrate the academic and practical usefulness of the framework. It is argued that the general hypothesis of the framework offers clear directions for further empirical research and theory building about privacy concerns in smart cities, and that it provides a sensitizing instrument for local governments to identify the absence, presence, or emergence of privacy concerns among their citizens.

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The spectrum of control: A social theory of the smart city

an article by Jathan Sadowski (Arizona State University) and Frank Pasquale (University of Maryland’s Francis King Carey School of Law) published in First Monday Volume 20 Number 7 (July 2015)

Abstract

There is a certain allure to the idea that cities allow a person to both feel at home and like a stranger in the same place. That one can know the streets and shops, avenues and alleys, while also going days without being recognized. But as élites fill cities with “smart” technologies – turning them into platforms for the “Internet of Things” (IoT): sensors and computation embedded within physical objects that then connect, communicate, and/or transmit information with or between each other through the Internet – there is little escape from a seamless web of surveillance and power.

This paper will outline a social theory of the “smart city” by developing our Deleuzian concept of the “spectrum of control”. We present two illustrative examples: biometric surveillance as a form of monitoring, and automated policing as a particularly brutal and exacting form of manipulation. We conclude by offering normative guidelines for governance of the pervasive surveillance and control mechanisms that constitute an emerging critical infrastructure of the “smart city”.

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