Is a smartcity something we should do and build with caution? At first it looks great and full of potential but when you dig a little deeper it gets creepy really fast.
In the Netherlands we are already experimenting with this in some areas and it looks really promising and great. Everywhere internet access and the police/government can keep an eye on things. A sort of cctv. One of the most surveilleid European countries is London with 5,9 million camera’s. This gives a strange feeling for the next time you are in the UK.
Is something we should want? Yes, I know it has pro’s but it most definitely has also got a lot of con’s. One con being privacy; where is the data secured, how is the data secured (open source technology), who has access towards the data and yet more important what are the security protocols when data source get’s hacked. These and more questions are just popping up in my head.
And I do think that civilians have the right to know what the government does and how the entire process get’s handled. When the government tells you it has anonymized the data, it’s just bs. companies like Google and others have very smart people who can de-anonomize the data sets. It is possible. Researchers at MIT have already done it with cellular phone data. For more specific information.
The government of Amsterdam told in an interview that is was not possible or that they didn’t know that this would be possible. In other words they haven’t searched for it or didn’t want it. Amsterdam has a partnership with Google. So that get’s me a bit worried.
The same thing is going to happen in other cities for sure.