Now in this post I tried to make a little investigation in the ethical way of the smart cities approach. I quickly became aware of this topic because I remembered a really long investigation for my applied ethics class the last semester. There, I noticed how much the ethics could matter in a smart environment.
First of all, a smart environment (let’s call it like that, since cities aren’t the only smart constructions made my men) needs a lot of interconnection to work well. This means that there has to be bigger data interchange, and also, this brings many thoughts about the most controversial theme in the technology area: information. A lot of information will need to be passed around, is that safe?
Talking about the hacking and blackmaling these days, the environment in which the information moves can be very delicate, and people can take advantage on that. Imagine that a person has an access to the data flow of a certain person. That is one particular way to know absolutely everything about the person. Contacts, monetary information, work data. Obviously, bad people can use that information in an unethical way, mainly to ask for money, for marketing issues, etc.
Another case that I can imagine is that people could not only steal the information, but modify it and add it to the normal flow again. I think I am lacking a concrete scenario to solidify all of this. Imagine a person that goes to a laboratory to make some analysis. Unfortunately, that person has an abnormality in his or her blood, and further analysis are required. However no one knows that, because the results are been sent to his or her doctor. Now imagine that a hacker gets those results and changes them, to erease the problem or add more. It will seem that everything is fine or everything is wrong. The hacker can also send another things, thinking about malware. I know it is a dumb story now, but I just wanted to establish my point.
I really can’t stop thinking that there will need to be a special organization that takes care of all the data flow around the world, because the risk will increase with more and more connections and more and more data flowing. We will need more people taking care of all the things that concern cyber security more than ever. Many, many new things will be needed to be developed and implemented, but hey, we are on a good time to start worrying about that. This future is not so far away, but time goes very fast, and technology advances even more. As a final thought, I really think all of this concerns will generate a lot of work in the future.
We R Smart Citizens 