Smart surveillance

Once again, we are still thinking about the issues on smart cities. This theme concerns me in a big way, since I’ve been talking about the privacy of the data for some time now, and all the implications that making a smart city can bring with us. At this point, I think we have thought a lot about good and bad things about smart cities, but now, a more important issue is how to solve all this new problems.

We checked some links given by Ken to us. There, I can see that one of the objectives for a smart city is to not to be governed by one political party or a corporation, they want to make a smart city to benefit the community in general. But many people get triggered when they hear this. Not because they really want to deal with the government anymore (or do they?), but because they don’t seem to imagine how the data flow will be handled and by whom. Most importantly, who will be the data “owners”?

I think people get triggered when they say that data will be “free, “for all”, etc., following the so called “open data”, which flows its efforts in making the data available for all. Many companies have started to adopt this scheme, and start to publish things like thir budgets, their incomes, their reports, and several things like that. But hey, isn’t the information being “free” will bring a lot of problems as well? Well, I think the answers is yes, and the apparent solution is to have a mediator organism, and that is why I think people get uncomfortable with this idea.

Further videos talk about the surveillance, but that is also, and I strongly suggest in this, is a potential problem. One thing that is mentioned, and with reason, is that surveillance has no longer to be made by people, but the full processing is given to computers. For example, surveillance cameras no longer need to have a guard watching them, they can just use computer vision tools to adjust their use, they can be used to identify people, car plates and several things. But, as I also spoke, at which meassure does this become spying?

In my opinion, smart cities should have a mediator organism for the data protection, but not necessarily a government one. Data cannot be put into servers without its proper control. Also, there are surely some things that cannot be revealed, many delicate information is put everyday, things like payment information. But if a smart city is being developed, then can we also think about the machines themselves to mediate all of this? Well, that may also seem completely coherent, but also not in a near future, and also because there still are things that machines can’t do. That is an issue to be covered next, there may well be a great advance today, but is this an advance that we can’t handle as a community or as human beings? Topic to be discussed.