Smile, Your City Is Watching You

Local governments must protect your privacy as they turn to “smart city” technology.

Ben Green, New York Times Op-Ed, June 27, 2019

Mr. Green is the author of “The Smart Enough City: Putting Technology in Its Place to Reclaim Our Urban Future.”

Walking through the streets of New York City, you can feel the thrill of being lost in the crowd. As throngs of people filter past, each going about their days, it seems possible to blend in without being noticed.

But as municipalities and companies pursue the dream of “smart cities,” creating hyper-connected urban spaces designed for efficiency and convenience, this experience is receding farther and farther from reality.

Consider the LinkNYC kiosks installed across New York City — more than 1,700 are already in place, and there are plans for thousands more. These kiosks provide public Wi-Fi, free domestic phone calls and USB charging ports.

Yet the LinkNYC kiosks are not just a useful public service. They are owned and operated by CityBridge (a consortium of companies that includes investment and leadership from Sidewalk Labs — a subsidiary of Alphabet, the parent company of Google) and are outfitted with sensors and cameras that track the movements of everyone in their vicinity. Once you connect, the network will record your location every time you come within 150 feet of a kiosk. 

And although CityBridge calls this information “anonymized” because it doesn’t include your name or email address — the system instead records a unique identifier for each device that connects — when millions of these data points are collected and analyzed, such data can be used to track people’s movements and infer intimate details of their lives.

In other words, this free Wi-Fi network is funded the same way as Google itself: using data to sell ads. As Dan Doctoroff, a deputy mayor in the Bloomberg administration and now the founder and C.E.O. of Sidewalk Labs, told a conference in 2016, the company expects to “make a lot of money from this.”

LinkNYC exemplifies the trend in “smart cities” today: the deployment of technologies that expand the collection of personal data by government and corporations. Certainly, this data can be used for beneficial outcomes: reducing traffic, improving infrastructure and saving energy. But the data also includes detailed information about the activities of everyone in the city — data that could be used in numerous detrimental ways.

Whether we recognize it or not, technologies that cities deploy today will play a significant role in defining the social contract of the future. And as it stands, these smart city technologies have become covert tools for increasing surveillance, corporate profits and, at worst, social control. This undemocratic architecture increases government and corporate power over the public.

First, smart city technologies make it easier than ever for local and federal law enforcement to identify and track individuals. The police can create and gain access to widespread surveillance by acquiring their own technology, partnering with companies and requesting access to data and video footage held by companies. In Los Angeles, for example, automatic license plate readers recorded the location of more than 230 million vehicles in 2016 and 2017, information that, through data-sharing agreements, could have found its way into the hands of  Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Similarly, the police in suburban Portland, Ore., hoping to aid crime investigations, have used Amazon’s facial-recognition software to identify more than 1,000 people who have appeared in camera footage.

Second, the smart city is a dream come true for companies eager to increase the scale and scope of data they collect about the public. Companies that place cameras and sensors on Wi-Fi kiosks, trash cans and streetlights will gain what had been unattainable insights about the behavior of individuals. And given the vast reach of hard-to-trace data brokers that gather and share data without the public’s knowledge or consent, one company’s data can easily end up in another’s hands. All of this data can be used to exclude people from credit, jobs, housing and health care in ways that circumvent anti-discrimination laws.

Once these smart city technologies are installed, it will be almost impossible for anyone to avoid being tracked. Sensors will monitor the behavior of anyone with a Bluetooth- or Wi-Fi-connected device. Given the expansive reach of cameras and the growing use of facial-recognition software, it is increasingly impossible to escape surveillance even by abandoning one’s personal digital technology. 

This reality suggests that if you want to avoid being tracked in a smart city, you must stay out of that city.

The urban poor and minorities, who are already the most vulnerable to online tracking, face the most severe harms of smart city surveillance. For instance, while well-off New Yorkers who do not want LinkNYC to track them can forgo free Wi-Fi in favor of a personal data plan, poorer residents may have no alternative to LinkNYC’s free Wi-Fi (indeed, a major selling point of LinkNYC is to provide internet access to those who cannot afford it) and must accept being tracked in exchange for this access. This amounts to a “data tax” that the poor must pay to use the basic infrastructure necessary to engage in modern society.

Smart cities thus are in a position to provide welfare offices, law enforcement, employers, data brokers and others who use data with a new tool for surveillance and exploitation. An undocumented mother could be flagged for deportation because she was identified at a protest by camera footage. A black teenager could be identified for surveillance by the police because he connects to a public Wi-Fi beacon that is often used by people with criminal records. An older citizen could be targeted for predatory loans because his car was identified by automatic license plate readers as it was driven into or out of an impound lot.

Yet instances like those are not inevitable outcomes of new technology. The way to create cities that everyone can traverse without fear of surveillance and exploitation is to democratize the development and control of smart city technology.

To do this, municipalities must ground their decisions about technology in democratic deliberation that allows the public to have a voice in shaping its development, acquisition and use. Several cities are leading the way. For example, when Chicago was developing its Array of Things project— several hundred sensors installed throughout the city to track environmental conditions like air quality, pedestrian and vehicle traffic, and temperature — the city held numerous public meetings and released policy drafts to promote discussion on how to protect privacy. Those conversations helped shape policies and led to a significant reduction in the amount of camera footage that is retained.

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But it is not enough for cities merely to reach out to the public — the public must have meaningful oversight of municipal technology. To that end, surveillance ordinances that passed in Seattle;  Oakland, Calif.; and Cambridge, Mass., in recent years require every municipal department to hold public meetings and obtain City Council approval before acquiring any surveillance technology. San Francisco passed a full ban on the municipal use of facial-recognition technology in May; the California cities of Oakland and Berkeley plus Somerville, Mass., are expected to follow suit.

Cities must also use their leverage to assert themselves as market makers and demand that technology companies respect the public’s privacy. Municipalities can require enforceable privacy standards in partnerships with companies. The Spanish city of Barcelona is a pioneer in this approach, restructuring contracts with several major technology vendors to enhance the public’s ownership and control of data. Municipalities may also be able to emphasize privacy as a condition of a company operating its services in the city, for example, by adopting privacy requirements that any company seeking a permit must abide by.

Rushing to become a smart city may lead to new insights and efficiencies, but at the cost of creating cities in which the government and companies wield immense power to exploit and manipulate the public. Yet by engaging the public about privacy concerns, providing it with the opportunity to reject undue surveillance and reining in ceaseless data accumulation by private companies, cities can democratize urban technology and improve urban life without collecting and abusing vast quantities of information about people.

Whether you truly are anonymous in the crowd on your next walk in the city will depend on whether that city is serious about protecting your privacy and creating a democratic social contract for urban life.

Ben Green, a Ph.D. candidate in applied math at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Science, is the author of “The Smart Enough City: Putting Technology in Its Place to Reclaim Our Urban Future.”

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