Tag Archives: privacy

“Creating Smart Cities” workshop videos: Session 3

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We are happy to share the third set of videos from The Programmable City’s recent workshop “Creating Smart Cities”, Session 3: Privacy and security concerns in smart cities. [Session 1 here, Session 2 here]

Pseudonymisation and the Smart City: Considering the General Data Protection Regulation

Maria Murphy, Maynooth University

Abstract
The great promise of smart cities is tempered by the very real risks associated with the large-scale collection, sharing, and analysis of data. As the General Data Protection Regulation – set to apply from May 2018 – attempts to respond to the modern data processing environment, this paper considers the implications of the new Regulation for the smart city. In particular, this paper examines the introduction of a “privacy by design” mandate and considers the endorsement of pseudonymisation as a privacy enhancing technique. The “positive-sum” pro- privacy and pro-progress philosophy of the privacy by design approach would appear, on first inspection, to perfectly address the challenges of the smart city. In reality, of course, while privacy by design offers a helpful “mindset”, it is certainly not a panacea.

From start to smart: A 100 smart cities but where are the citizens?

Ayona Datta, King’s College London

Abstract

In January 2016, the Indian government announced the first 20 winners of its smart cities challenge. This is the start of the journey for these cities to becoming smart. As part of this challenge, each city developed a pan-city and area-based proposal to reflect their local context, resources, and priorities of citizens. At the end of this journey a total of 100 small to medium cities in India would have retrofitted their chosen urban areas with smart infrastructure, transport, housing and governance. The end of this journey for the 100 cities will seemingly mark the beginning of India’s new urban age.
In this paper, I search for the elusive citizens in India’s ambitious national urbanization programme of creating 100 Smart Cities. Examining the different smart city proposals submitted by the nominated cities for the smart cities challenge, I argue that each of these seek to present particular visions, imageries and fantasies of performing the smart citizen. These can be roughly presented as 1) Fast-tracked citizens- the near overnight production of a mega base of urban ‘population’ in each city for the mandatory citizen consultation in the smart city challenge. 2) Acquiescent citizens who contribute to open data, engage in e-governance and increase ‘civic discipline’ through citizen surveillance 3) Entrepreneurial citizens who contribute to economic growth and prosperity of the smart city, who are framed as careerist and heroic, but who individually and collectively take the risk and precarity of speculative markets on their shoulders.
Through these three figures, this paper will ask how the ‘citizen’ has become the biggest urban fantasy of India’s Smart city challenge, and what are the consequences of this fantasy. The answer to these questions will have profound consequences for the understanding of India’s urban futures and the urbanization of citizenships in the region.

[Video not available]

The Privacy Parenthesis: The Structural Transformation of the Private Sphere

Leighton Evans, University of Brighton

Abstract

The “Snowden Revelations” that revealed the extent of surveillance of everyday citizens in everyday life have been a focal event for discussion on the mediation of privacy itself in the digital age. As technological development moves towards the everyday integration of things in the “Internet of Everything”, this chapter focuses upon the shifting sense of privacy in spaces that were once considered “private” in light of the extraordinary levels of data collection continuing unabated in everyday life. To do this, I use the metaphor of parenthesis as a way of conceptualising the separateness of the private realm from other realms of human activity. The use of parenthesis here is in a dual articulation; parenthesis articulates both the separate nature of the private and problematizes the modern conception of privacy as a separate, private space linked to property ownership that is being challenged by digital media. Discussions on the “end of privacy” can be assimilated into this metaphor; in essence, this approach rejects the claim to an end of privacy but argues that privacy itself (here, the very nature of what lies in parenthesis) is changing from a spatial privacy to another, non-spatial form. This non-spatial privacy is characterised as intentional, mannered and performed, and is reflected upon with reference to the development of the smart city as a concept and phenomenal space.

From data subjects to data producers: negotiating the role of the public in urban digital data governance

Christine Richter (University of Twente), Linnet Taylor (Tilburg Institute for Law, Technology, and Society), Shazade Jameson (Independent), and Carmen Pérez del Pulgar (Institut de Ciència i Tecnologia Ambientals)

Abstract

Today’s smart city programs and systems bring private and public sector actors together in ways that are creating streams of data about citizens, and these streams inhabit a legal and practical grey area between the public and private domains. Digital traces from sensors and digital communications tools can be merged and linked with official records, volunteered data from apps, social media, and citizen feedback systems in ways that have implications for privacy and data protection. City authorities are not yet addressing the ethical implications of today’s data governance decisions: seemingly inconsequential data often contain intimate behavioural and locational traces, and all digital data produced by people have a long half-life, gaining in both financial value and sensitivity over time. As data become big data, existing rules and norms (such as the Fair Information Practice Principles) become unworkable, and regimes developed for analogue data are not easily updated for the era of ubiquitous computing, profiling and artificial intelligence. This creates new questions for urban governance: what elements of public life are private processes, and how can they be balanced with the benefits of sharing to create public goods, such as health and education? Cities are currently on the cusp of understanding the breadth of applications and potential of digital data for governance and functionality in urban space: city governments are likely to become an important hub for data exchange in the future, and to form part of the emerging international data market. How can city governments make informed choices about the kinds of infrastructures they set up, how can they understand the longer-term implications of those choices, and how do different infrastructures and processes to do with data build differing relationships between cities and citizens?

Call for paper: Data driven cities? Digital urbanism and its proxies

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We are organising a special issues on data-driven cities. You can find more details below and we look forward to your proposals.

 

Tecnoscienza. Italian Journal of Science and Technology Studies

SPECIAL ISSUE

“DATA DRIVEN CITIES? DIGITAL URBANISM AND ITS PROXIES”

Guest editors:

Claudio Coletta (Maynooth University)

Liam Heaphy (Maynooth University)

Sung-Yueh Perng (Maynooth University)

Laurie Waller (Technische Universität München)

Call for papers:

In the last few decades, data and software have become an integral part of urban life, producing a radical transformation of social relations in cities. Contemporary urban environments are characterised by dense arrangements of data, algorithms, mobile devices, and networked infrastructures. Multiple technologies (such as smart metering, sensing networks, GPS transponders, CCTV, induction loops, and mobile apps) are connected with numerous processes (such as institutional data management, data brokering, crowdsourcing, and workflow management), in order to provide sustainable, efficient, and integrated city governance and services. Accordingly, big data and algorithms have started to play a prominent role in informing decision-making and in performing the spatial, material, and temporal dimensions of cities.

Smart city initiatives undertaken globally are characterised by highlighting the purported benefits of partly automating management of public services, new forms of civic engagement enabled by digital infrastructures, and the potentials for innovating policy and fostering economic development.

Yet, contributions within STS, Critical Data Studies, Geography, Sociology, Media Studies and Anthropology have contested the neutral and apolitical nature of (big) data and the ahistorical, aspatial, homogenizing vision of cities in favour of an understanding that recognizes the situated multiplicity of actual digital urbanism. The politics of data, data analytics and visualizations perform within specific urban and code assemblages embodying specific versions of real-time and anticipatory governance. At the same time, these studies highlight the risks of dataveillance as well as the corporatisation of governance and technocratic solutionism which, especially coupled with austerity regimes, seem to reinforce inequalities while influencing people’s lives out of the public grasp. Within this context, vested interests interact in a multi-billion global market where corporations, companies and start-ups propose data-driven urban solutions, while public administrations increasingly delegate control over citizens’ data. Also, public institutions and private companies leverage the efforts of open data movements, engaged civic communities and citizen-minded initiatives to find new ways to create public and economic value from urban data.

The aim of this special issue is therefore to encourage critical and transdisciplinary debates on the epistemological and ontological implications of actual data-driven urbanism: its uncertain, fragile, contested, conflicting nature; the different forms of performing and making sense of the urban environment through data and algorithms; the different ways to approach the relationship between data, software and cities; the urban and code assemblages that are produced.

To what extent cities are understandable through data? How do software and space work in urban everyday life and urban management? How do data and policies actually shape each other? What forms of delegation, enrolment and appropriation take place?

We welcome theoretical and empirical contributions critically addressing the following (non-exhaustive-list-of) topics:

– urban big data, city dashboards;

– data analytics and data brokering;

– IoT based urban services;

– predictive analytics and anticipatory governance;

– civic hacking, open data movements;

– privacy, security and surveillance in data-driven cities;

– crowd, mobility and traffic management;

– sensors, monitoring, mapping and modelling for urban facilities;

– digitization of built environment.

 

Deadline for abstract submissions: June 30th, 2016

Abstracts (in English) with a maximum length of 1000 words should be sent as email attachments to redazione@tecnoscienza.net and carbon copied to the guest editor at datadrivencities@tecnoscienza.net. Notification of acceptance will be communicated by July 2016.

Deadline for full submissions: October 15th, 2016.

Submissions (in English with a maximum length of 8000 words, including notes and references) can be made via the Journal’s submission system at www.tecnoscienza.net and an electronic copy of the article should be sent to redazione@tecnoscienza.net. The papers will be subject to a blind peer refereed review process. The special issue is expected to be published in 2017.

For further information about the special issue, contact the guest editors at datadrivencities@tecnoscienza.net.

For further information about the Journal please visit the Journal’s web site at http://www.tecnoscienza.net.

Claudio, Liam, Sung-Yueh and Laurie

Smart cities, privacy, data protection and cybersecurity

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Last Thursday saw the launch of the ‘Getting Smarter about Smart Cities: Improving Data Privacy and Data Security‘ report by Rob Kitchin and published by the Department of the Taoiseach.  The report was submitted a few days before the publication of a similar report by Lilian Edwards titled ‘Privacy, Security and Data Protection in Smart Cities: a Critical EU Law Perspective‘ and therefore has no reference to it.  Whereas my report takes a more governance and policy focused approach, Lilian’s is more legally focused.  If taken as a pair I think they provide a pretty comprehensive overview of the various privacy and security issues raised by smart city technologies and possible solutions.

Kitchin smart citiesEdwards smart cities

New report: Getting smarter about smart cities: Improving data privacy and data security

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report launchAs part of ‘EU Data Protection Day’ a new report – “Getting smarter about smart cities: Improving data privacy and data security” – was launched today by Dara Murphy T.D., Minister for European Affairs and Data Protection.  The report, commissioned by the Data Protection Unit, Department of the Taoiseach (Irish Prime Minister) and written by Rob Kitchin (of The Programmable City project), is the first publication by the new Government Data Forum, a panel of experts drawn from across industry, civil society, academia and the public sector. The Forum advises Government on the opportunities and challenges for society and the economy arising from continued growth in the generation and use of personal data.  The report is available from the Department of the Taoiseach website or click here.

Executive Summary
Many cities around the world are seeking to become a smart city, using networked, digital technologies and urban big data to tackle a range of issues, such as improving governance and service delivery, creating more resilient critical infrastructure, growing the local economy, becoming more sustainable, producing better mobility, gaining transparency and accountability, enhancing quality of life, and increasing safety and security. In short, the desire is to use digital technology to improve the lives of citizens, finesse city management, and create economic development.

In this context, a wide range of smart city technologies are being deployed within urban environments, including city operating systems, centralised control rooms, urban dashboards, intelligent transport systems, integrated travel ticketing, bike share schemes, real-time passenger information displays, logistics management systems, smart energy grids, controllable lighting, smart meters, sensor networks, building management systems, and an array of smartphone apps and sharing economy platforms. All of these technologies generate huge quantities of data, much of them in real-time and at a highly granular scale.

These data about cities and their citizens can be put to many good uses and, if shared, for uses beyond the system and purposes for which they were generated. Collectively, these data create the evidence base to run cities more efficiently, productively, sustainably, transparently and fairly. However, generating, processing, analysing, sharing and storing large amounts of actionable data also raise a number of concerns and challenges.

Key amongst these are the data privacy, data protection, and data security issues that arise from the creation of smart cities. Many smart city technologies capture personally identifiable information (PII) and household level data about citizens – their characteristics, their location and movements, and their activities – link these data together to produce new derived data, and use them to create profiles of people and places and to make decisions about them. As such, there are concerns about what a smart city means for people’s privacy and what privacy harms might arise from the sharing, analysis and misuse of urban big data. In addition, there are questions as to how secure smart city technologies and the data they generate are from hacking and theft and what the implications of a data breach are for citizens. While successful cyberattacks on cities are still relatively rare, it is clear that smart city technologies raise a number of cybersecurity concerns that require attention.

To date, the approach to these issues has been haphazard and uncoordinated due to the ad-hoc manner in which they were developed. However, given the potential harms to citizens and the associated costs that can arise, and the potential benefits at stake, this approach should not be allowed to continue. The challenge is to rollout smart city solutions and gain the benefits of their deployment while maintaining infrastructure and system security and systematically minimising any pernicious effects and harms. This is no easy task, given the many stakeholders and vested interests involved and their differing aims and ambitions, and the diverse set of technologies and their complex arrangement.

This report details the development of smart cities and urban big data, highlights the various privacy and security concerns and harms related to the deployment and use of smart city technologies and initiatives, and makes a number of suggestions for addressing trepidations about and ills arising from data privacy, protection and security issues.

It argues that there is no single solution for ensuring that the benefits of creating smart cities are realised and any negative effects are neutralised. Rather, it advocates a multi-pronged approach that uses a suite of solutions, some of which are market driven, some more technical in nature (privacy enhancement technologies), others more policy, regulatory and legally focused (revised fair information practice principles, privacy by design, security by design, education and training), and some more governance and management orientated (at three levels: vision and strategy – smart city advisory board and smart city strategy; oversight of delivery and compliance – smart city governance, ethics and security oversight committee; and day-to-day delivery – core privacy/security team, smart city privacy/security assessments, and computer emergency response team).

These solutions provide a balanced, pragmatic approach that enable the rollout of smart city technologies and initiatives, but in a way that is not prejudicial to people’s privacy, actively work to minimise privacy harms, curtail data breaches, and tackle cybersecurity issues. They also work across the entire life-cycle (from procurement to decommissioning) and span the whole system ecology (all its stakeholders and components). Collectively they promote fairness and equity, protect citizens and cities from harms, and enable improved governance and economic development. Moreover, they do so using an approach that is not heavy handed in nature and is relatively inexpensive to implement. They are by no means definitive, but build on and extend work to date, advance the debate, and detail a practical route forward.

The report concludes that a core requirement for creating smart cities is the adoption of an ethical, principle-led approach designed to best serve the interests of citizens. In other words, being smart about how we plan and run cities consists of much more than deploying data-driven, networked technologies; it requires a smart approach.

Event – Privacy: gathering insights from lawyers and technologists

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privacy-law-highlightThe roundtable event ‘Privacy: Gathering insights from lawyers and technologists’ is scheduled for Wednesday 1st July 2015. The Event will be held at the Phoenix Building, North Campus, Maynooth University and has been organised by faculty at the University in conjunction with the British and Irish Law Education and Technology Association.

The event will bring technologists, legal practitioners, technology companies and academics together in order to address the common issues faced by the different parties. The goal is to facilitate the communication of differing perspectives in an effort to formulate a unified approach to developing privacy issues.

Confirmed speakers for the event are:

Keynotes
Dara Murphy, TD – Minister for European Affairs and Data Protection.
Helen Dixon – Data Protection Commissioner of Ireland.

Confirmed speakers for the first session of the event, “Privacy in a digital world: notions and understandings of privacy in a digital infrastructure”, are:

Confirmed speakers for the second session of the event, “The Right to be Forgotten, demystified…”, are:

  • Ronan Kennedy, Lecturer in Law, National University of Ireland, Galway.
  • Dr Michael Lang, Lecturer in Information Systems, National University of Ireland, Galway.
  • William Malcolm, Senior Privacy Counsel, Google
  • Rob Corbet, Technology and Innovation Lawyer, Arthur Cox
  • Eoin O’Dell, Associate Professor, School of Law, Trinity College Dublin

For further information and tickets to the event, please visit the project webpage or contact the organisers Maria Murphy or Leighton Evans.

New paper: Continuous geosurveillance in the smart city

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A new paper by Rob Kitchin has been published in DIS Magazine as part of its fascinating ‘Data issue‘.  The paper explores the extent to which geosurveillance is becoming pervasive and routinised and the consequences of such geosurveillance with respect to civil rights and governance, and is accompanied by some original art by Mark Dorf (also used in the site banner above)  It starts thus:

“For the past couple of decades there has been a steady stream of analysis that has documented the ways in which the rollout of new digital and networked technologies have enabled increasingly pervasive and extensive forms of state and corporate surveillance. Such technologies have the capability to capture and communicate data about their use; simultaneously a wealth of sophisticated software has been developed that processes and acts on such data in automated, autonomous, and automatic ways. Importantly, the use of embedded GPS, sensors, and digital cameras are enabling location and movement to be tracked, facilitating extensive geosurveillance of people and places.

Continuous geosurveillance relies on the production of spatial big data, and in particular the notion of the “smart city” takes center stage, that is, urban landscapes that can be monitored, managed and regulated in real-time using ICT infrastructure and ubiquitous computing. Such instrumented cities are promoted as providing enhanced and more efficient and effective city services, ensuring safety and security, and providing resilience to economic and environmental shocks, but they also seriously infringe upon citizen’s privacy and are being used to profile and socially sort people, enact forms of anticipatory governance, and enable control creep, that is re-appropriation for uses beyond their initial design.

What follows is a consideration of the unfettered rush to create “smart cities” that is sensitive to the risks involved in extensively monitored urban landscapes. Are too much data about people and places being generated by public and private institutions and used to profile, sort, and sift in pernicious ways? In the rush to create smart cities is the privacy and freedom we expect in liberal democracies being eroded? Perhaps most alarming, are we creating cities that represent the interests of a select group of corporations and technocrats, rather than producing ones that represent the best interests of all citizens? ….”