The Allure of the Smart City

The concept of smart city seems to encompass a broad range of sociotechnical initiatives, including community-based healthcare, digital electricity, housing affordability and sustainability, next-generation infrastructure, noise pollution, quality of air and water, robotic furniture, transport and mobility, and urban planning. The smart city is not a technology as such, more like an assemblage of technologies.

Within this mix, there is often a sincere attempt to address some serious social and environmental concerns, such as reducing the city's carbon footprint. However, Professor Rob Kitchen notes a tendency towards greenwashing or even ethics washing.

Kitchen also raises concerns about civic paternalism - city authorities and their tech partners knowing what's best for the citizenry.

On the other hand, John Koetsier makes the point that If-We-Don't-Do-It-The-Chinese-Will. This point was also recently made by Jeremy Fleming in his 2021 Vincent Briscoe lecture. (See my post on the Invisibility of Infrastructure.)

Meanwhile, here is a small and possibly unrepresentative sample of Smart City initiatives in the West that have reached the press recently.

• Madrid with IBM
  
• Portland with Google Sidewalk - cancelled Feb 2021
• San Jose with Intel - pilot programme
  
• Toronto with Google Sidewalk (Quayside) - cancelled May 2020
  

 

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Daniel Doctoroff, Why we’re no longer pursuing the Quayside project — and what’s next for Sidewalk Labs (Sidewalk Talk, 7 May 2020)

Rob Kitchen, The Ethics of Smart Cities (RTE 27 April 2019)

John Koetsier, 9 Things We Lost When Google Canceled Its Smart Cities Project In Toronto (Forbes, 13 May 2020) 

Ryan Mark and Gregory Anya, Ethics of Using Smart City AI and Big Data: The Case of Four Large European Cities (Orbit, Vol 2/2, 2019)

Juan Pedro Tomás, Smart city case study: San Jose, California (Enterprise IOT Insights, 5 October 2017)

Jane Wakefield, The Google city that has angered Toronto (BBC News, 18 May 2019), Google-linked smart city plan ditched in Portland (BBC News, 23 February 2021)

 

See also IOT is coming to town (December 2017), On the invisibility of infrastructure (April 2021)

 

IOT is coming to town

You better watch out

#WatchOut Analysis of smartwatches for children (Norwegian Consumer Council, October 2017). BoingBoing comments that

Kids' smart watches are a security/privacy dumpster-fire.

Charlie Osborne, Smartwatch security fails to impress: Top devices vulnerable to cyberattack (ZDNet, 22 July 2015)

A new study into the security of smartwatches found that 100 percent of popular device models contain severe vulnerabilities.

Matt Hamblen, As smartwatches gain traction, personal data privacy worries mount (Computerworld, 22 May 2015)

Companies could use wearables to track employees' fitness, or even their whereabouts. 

You better not cry

Source: Affectiva

Rana el Kaliouby, The Mood-Aware Internet of Things (Affectiva, 24 July 2015)

Six Wearables to Track Your Emotions (A Plan For Living)

Soon it might be just as common to track your emotions with a wearable device as it is to monitor your physical health. 

Anna Umanenko, Emotion-sensing technology in the Internet of Things (Onyx Systems)

Better not pout

Shaun Moore, Fooling Facial Recognition (Medium, 26 October 2017)

Mingzhe Jiang et al, IoT-based Remote Facial Expression Monitoring System with sEMG Signal (IEEE 2016)

Facial expression recognition is studied across several fields such as human emotional intelligence in human-computer interaction to help improving machine intelligence, patient monitoring and diagnosis in clinical treatment. 

I'm telling you why

Maria Korolov, Report: Surveillance cameras most dangerous IoT devices in enterprise (CSO, 17 November 2016)

Networked security cameras are the most likely to have vulnerabilities. 

Leor Grebler, Why do IOT devices die (Medium, 3 December 2017)

IOT is coming to town

Nick Ismail, The role of the Internet of Things in developing Smart Cities (Information Age, 18 November 2016)

It's making a list And checking it twice

Daan Pepijn, Is blockchain tech the missing link for the success of IoT? (TNW, 21 September 2017)

Gonna find out Who's naughty and nice

Police Using IoT To Detect Crime (Cyber Security Intelligence, 14 Feb 2017)

James Pallister, Will the Internet of Things set family life back 100 years? (Design Council, 3 September 2015)

It sees you when you're sleeping It knows when you're awake

But don't just monitor your sleep. Understand it. The Sense app gives you instant access to everything you could want to know about your sleep. View a detailed breakdown of your sleep cycles, see what happened during your night, discover trends in your sleep quality, and more. (Hello)

Octav G, Samsung’s SLEEPsense is an IoT-enabled sleep tracker (SAM Mobile, 2 September 2015)

It knows if you've been bad or good So be good for goodness sake!

US intelligence chief: we might use the internet of things to spy on you (The Guardian, 9 Feb 2015)

Ben Rossi, IoT and free will: how artificial intelligence will trigger a new nanny state (Information Age, 7 June 2016)

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Twitter Version

Thread on #Privacy and the #InternetOfThings

— Richard Veryard (@richardveryard) December 4, 2017

Related Posts

Pax Technica - The Book (November 2017)
Pax Technica - The Conference (November 2017)
Pax Technica - On Risk and Security (November 2017)
The Smell of Data (December 2017)

Updated 10 December 2017