Privacy or Progress: a position paper on smart cities

          

            Smart TVs, Smartphones, and now Smart Cities. According to National Geographic, a smart city is a city where many sensors are used to gather data from people and infrastructure for the improvement of the city itself. To put it simply, a city where a lot of sensors are placed to be used as metrics for quality-of-life improvements.

          Although, Smart Cities are very innovative and has potential, the amount of sensors that the city would have may interfere with the lives its inhabitants. Usage of resources, movement and transportation, as well as entertainment may all be tracked by sensors in smart cities. Are all the possible breaches of privacy really worth the progress and innovation this city might give?

          As stated earlier, Smart Cities might inconvenience the inhabitants by how many sensors the city needs, specifically in terms of privacy. Having a variety of sensors will produce a lot of data, which can be analyzed by machine learning algorithms or data scientists. This will, without a doubt be beneficial in solving the problems and quality-of-life issues the city may face.

          Despite all this, the inhabitants' personal lives and privacy may be invaded or intruded by the sensors. Personal location and activity is an example, I personally do not feel comfortable when each of my movements in the city will be tracked and noted down in a database. This issue already occurs in China, where heavy surveillance, involving cameras and advanced facial recognition tracks every individual's move. Another privacy issue is the threat of hackers breaching the firewalls protecting the user data.         

            Although these disadvantages exist, technology continues to improve, technological advancements in cybersecurity may prevent the database from being hacked or leaked. Additional methods to collect viable data without invasion of privacy may be developed as well. AI in the future may also be powerful enough to predict the needs of the city with less data input.

          To conclude, Smart Cities are still developing and are still to improve. Current disadvantages might no longer exist in a couple of years. We must not shun the idea of smart cities just because of the privacy issues, because when the issues are resolved by newer tech, the benefits will outweigh the disadvantages.