Examining Smart City Backlash

A look at how people are reacting to 'smart' and trust, and surveillance and privacy stretching that are parts of smart city plans and implementations.  Is it best to see these ideas as primarily cost saving and life improving?  Or addressing outliers like solving and preventing crime in city spaces?     Both are happening today.

https://penniur.upenn.edu/  Penn Institute for Urban Research

What’s Fueling the Smart City Backlash?

A new phase of pause and double-check assumptions seems to have gripped the three-decades-old global movement of overstressed urban centers transitioning to so-called smart cities with innovative, technology-led promises. The latest phase is marked by scattered, local-level resistance by residents to smart-city programs in big cities like Toronto and New York to small towns such as Ross, California — near San Francisco — with less than 2,500 residents.

Other cities have banned specific technologies such as facial recognition software, amid doubts over its accuracy or concerns over cities stealthily collecting such data on their citizens through video surveillance. In some cases, they see technology companies forming opaque partnerships with city-level agencies to profit from projects at their expense, using public resources such as land and development rights.

Fears over privacy intrusions in today’s digital age and unbridled development compromising the public interest have been heightened by the erosion of trust between residents, city administrations and private companies leading “smart” projects. With increased transparency, and stronger citizen engagement, the smart-city movement could regain lost credibility and continue its growth, according to experts who spoke with Knowledge@Wharton.

For the most part, residents are wary about how city governments and big technology companies involved in the projects will track and collect data about their daily activities while not compromising their privacy and security by selling data without their consent. In several cases, legislators in many U.S. states have enacted or are considering laws to ban or limit the erection of 5G cell towers because of health concerns.

Data privacy and security issues are more sensitive in some settings than others. “Smart cities mean different things to different people, but big data is intrinsic to these initiatives and thus privacy concerns arise,” notes Susan Wachter, Wharton professor of real estate and finance. “However, some initiatives such as coordinated traffic lights are high on efficiency and low on privacy issues — and they are no brainers. Others, such as tracking people — much as is done in private places such as malls — provoke a backlash because they undermine the anonymity privilege of public spaces.” ... '