Smart cities: are we sleepwalking into a Big Brother future of constant surveillance in the name of improved efficiency and safety?
When
Eva Blum-Dumontet, a research officer for London-based non-profit
Privacy International, attends conferences, she likes to ask people she
meets if they live in a smart city.
The
answer is often “no”, she says, and that is because respondents are
unaware that they are from one of the many cities pouring money into
such initiatives. A smart city is an urban area that uses different
types of electronic data collection sensors to supply information which
is used to manage assets and resources efficiently.
This
response is worrying, Blum-Dumontet says, because it means they are
ignorant of the potential risks to their privacy and security.
Metropolises
around the world – including Hong Kong, which unveiled its blueprint
last December – are racing to become smart cities, building an
“intelligent” infrastructure geared towards greater efficiency. But what
does it take to make a city smart?
“Smart
city is a concept born in the late ’90s describing the digitalisation
of urban information and the potential to apply artificial intelligence
to information collected through sensors, to give timely responses to
metropolitan problems,” says Dr Sara Degli-Esposti, a research fellow at
the Centre for Business in Society at Coventry University in Britain.
The
technology offers a wide range of solutions in areas such as traffic
control, pollution and waste management, and effective use of energy.
According
to a McKinsey report published in June, the world’s smartest cities are
New York, Singapore and San Francisco. However, the Chinese cities of
Shenzhen, Beijing and Shenzhen, and the South Korean capital Seoul, are
catching up quickly, the US consulting firm said.
Another
report, released by Deloitte earlier this year, found that China has
500 smart city pilot projects under way – half of the world’s total.
One
such initiative is under way in the eastern city of Nanjing, which is
collaborating with Germany-based software company SAP to create an
intelligent traffic system.
“They
are taking data from taxis and buses – their GPS location, their speed –
and using the data from video cameras, traffic signals, plotting them
into a traffic control system and using that to make decisions on
roadworks, re-routing of buses and traffic deviation,” says Max Claps,
who leads the company’s Future Cities team.
Despite
the obvious benefits, however, experts warn that, around the world,
citizens are woefully unaware of the impact smart city initiatives could
have on their personal privacy. Smart technology also hands governments
and their law enforcement agencies powerful tools to monitor citizens,
control their behaviour and take surveillance to a whole new level, they
warn.
“Smart cities go hand in hand
with this idea of smart policing,” says Blum-Dumontet. “With facial
recognition, you can easily follow a citizen step by step using a city’s
cameras and sensors – where they’re going, with whom they’re meeting.
Tracking an individual becomes extremely easy because it’s impossible to
escape the gaze of the state.”
That
could be a serious concern for citizens of authoritarian states, and in
China facial recognition systems are becoming a way of life. The
technology is being used for a range of commercial applications in the
retail, banking and travel industries, but also for security purposes,
including identifying criminals and jaywalkers.
It
is also being used in the restive, Muslim-majority Xinjiang Uygur
autonomous region, ostensibly to curtail protests by detecting where
crowds are gathering.
A UN panel
this week heard “credible reports” that a million Uygurs are being
detained in internment camps in the region, in the name of combating
Islamic extremism and separatist sentiments. Beijing strongly denied the
claim.
Singapore,
which is striving to become the world’s first smart nation plans to
install more than 100,000 CCTV cameras on lamp posts, linked to facial
recognition software. The government says they will help catch traffic
violators and letterers, people smoking in prohibited spaces, and combat
other illegal activities.
Increasingly,
surveillance is occurring not just in public areas but also in private
spaces. Wireless sensors have been fitted in homes for the elderly in
Singapore to monitor the movements, sleeping patterns and even bathroom
use of residents.
Blum-Dumontet writes in the report, Smart Cities – Utopian Vision, Dystopian Reality:
“While these initiatives have obvious intended positive aims, they are
also highly intrusive, and open to potential misuse or diversion towards
less altruistic ends.”
Under
current legislation, law enforcement agencies in Singapore are
permitted access to the data without seeking court approval or citizen
consultation, she adds.
Singapore
has partnered with French software company Dassault Systèmes to create
Virtual Singapore, a 3D city model and platform that aggregates all the
real-time city data collected by the nation’s sensors and camera. It is
almost a real-world version of the video game SimCity. It will allow the
government to zoom in on any flat and scan it for information – its
size, number of residents, energy consumption and more.
Hong Kong’s plan to become a ‘smart city’ needs some fresh thinking
Blum-Dumontet
cautions that whereas once our behaviour could be tracked only when we
are online, we can now be under surveillance permanently.
“Having
your energy monitored [by smart meters] means 24/7, what you’re doing
in the house is being monitored by the energy companies and the
government. You enter a world where you can no longer escape the
surveillance,” says Blum-Dumontet. This is particularly pertinent to
citizens of countries with poor human rights records and no legal
framework in place to protect citizens’ data.
The
“Big Brother” effect is not confined to authoritarian regimes. Even in
democratic countries where people have the rights to protest and
organise, smart technology could erode people’s capacity to dissent, she
says.
“You’re not alone when you
protest. You’re part of a crowd and it gives you strength. You find a
form of anonymity by being in a crowd,” says Blum-Dumontet. Yet
extensive use of facial recognition software enables law enforcement to
identify every participant.
You enter a world where you can no longer escape the surveillance
Eva Blum-Dumontet, research officer for Privacy International
“Digital
technology lowers the cost of surveillance and increases the imbalance
of power between people – the surveilled subject – and corporations or
the state and their almighty vigilant eye,” says Degli-Esposti, whose
research focuses on the ethical implications of digital technology.
Claps,
from SAP, acknowledges that it is becoming increasingly difficult to
protect privacy in an interconnected world. One way of doing so, he
says, is to increase transparency, offer layers of consent, and
establish detailed rules on collection, access and use of data. However,
such a framework is unlikely to become a reality in more authoritarian
countries.
Concerns about smart
utilities – designed to generate more accurate billing information – go
beyond the fact that they can track our behaviour.
“The
more we replace non-automated objects with automated ones, the more we
become vulnerable to malware attacks, data exfiltration, ransomwares,
denial-of-service attacks ironically produced by IoT [Internet of
Things] botnets,” says Degli-Esposti. “As long as you have an operating
system, which these days are mostly Android, iOS or Microsoft, the more
you can be subject to fairly common forms of attack.”
With
smart sensors and cameras detecting citizens’ every move, and
collecting large amounts of data, what will happen if it falls into the
wrong hands, or hackers hijack our smart infrastructure?
Past
cyberattacks illustrate how vulnerable even the most hi-tech
infrastructure can be. For example, the computer systems of a nuclear
plant operator in South Korea were breached in 2014. Though the
authorities insisted no critical data was leaked, the incident prompted
security fears.
Also worrying is that most regional governments and city councils rely on private companies to realise their smart vision.
“Private
companies are subject to strict confidentiality agreements, and terms
of service and use, which prevent the client from running third-party
penetration testing and getting a sense of actual risks,” Degli-Esposti
says. It’s important to have in-house talent to write detailed public
procurement specifications and maintain the software over time, she
adds.
“Officers
buying smart city solutions today will probably not be in office in 10
or 15 years, when these solutions will have to be replaced or deeply
updated.”
Such a scenario played
out in May last year when the Wannacry ransomware cyberattack infected
an estimated 200,000 computers worldwide, including those belonging to
Britain’s National Health Service trusts. An investigation revealed that
the incident could have been prevented if the trusts has patched or
upgraded older software.
China’s smart cities, social credit system and mass surveillance
Although
experts have spoken out on the risks inherent in smart cities, some
argue that the issues are still not being discussed by the wider public,
partly because of a lack of consultation when these initiatives are
introduced.
Blum-Dumontet sees an
obvious irony: “Governments claim that they’re creating smart cities to
offer better quality of services, and yet, if the general public is not
involved in the discussion, who do we make smart cities for?”