Smart City Privacy: What You Need to Know to Stay Safe

Smart city skyline with digital overlays showing connected IoT devices and urban technology.

Once an engineering fantasy, smart cities have emerged worldwide as efficient ways to enhance urban living. The future is now. Although smart cities can offer residents an optimal quality of life, they also raise extreme concerns about privacy rights.

When every aspect of city management is connected, and surveillance systems using AI-powered tools and facial recognition software are prolific, are the citizens of a smart city protected or is their privacy being violated?

Let’s take a look at how smart cities work, their benefits, how they impact privacy rights, and what power, if any, residents have to protect their privacy.

What are smart cities?

Smart cities are urban environments that integrate analytics, data, and technology to improve the efficiency of city management and public services, increase sustainability, and enhance the overall quality of life for residents.

A smart city relies on the Internet of Things (IoT) — a network of smart devices that communicate with each other and share data via sensors and software — to collect and analyze operational information. That constant connectivity is exactly why smart city security matters, because every connected sensor, camera, and platform can become a potential entry point for data exposure.

Smart city initiatives impact the following:

Energy Consumption: Smart cities reduce overall energy consumption and waste by utilizing smart technologies in energy grids, building infrastructure, and promoting the use of renewable energy sources.
Healthcare: Urban areas often have underserved populations that need accessible healthcare. Smart initiatives such as remote patient monitoring and telemedicine can help people in smart cities have access to the healthcare they need.
Public Safety: Smart surveillance systems that utilize tools like AI-powered analytics and facial recognition ostensibly increase public security protections and can improve emergency response times.
Sustainability: Optimized energy efficiency and management can help smart cities to focus on sustainability measures such as allocated resource use, promotion of renewable energy sources, and reduction of carbon emissions.
Traffic Management: IoT sensors and traffic lights can improve commute times and reduce traffic congestion.
Waste Management: In smart cities, garbage collection is optimized by sensors in dumpsters and garbage cans that detect when the trash is full and can increase the efficiency of garbage collection routes.

Real-world examples of smart cities

By 2020, the global market for smart cities was projected to grow to $820.7 billion by the end of 2025. Smart city initiatives are being implemented around the world, and more urban areas are expected to adopt smart measures in the future.

According to the United Nations, by 2050, almost 70% of the world’s population will live in urban areas. As more people flock to urban hubs, the urgent need for effective and efficient city management solutions increases. Although many U.S. urban areas have integrated some level of smart initiatives into their city plans, Asian cities lead the way.

Current real-world examples of smart cities include:

Singapore: Singapore first launched its smart city initiative in 2014, and currently offers, among other smart tools, smart technology solutions in public transportation via the Intelligent Transportation System (ITS), smart housing initiatives, and smart energy management.
Oslo, Norway: Norway’s capital city has transformed its public transportation system with electric vehicles, smart sensors, and other smart technology in traffic management and smart street lighting, among other measures.
New York City: New York launched a smart city pilot program in 2020 and currently has smart waste management, contactless information hubs, water management sensor technology, and other optimized smart initiatives in place.

Smart city privacy concerns over nonconsensual surveillance using AI and facial recognition.

What are the smart city privacy concerns?

Smart cities offer multiple benefits for residents and visitors alike, but are they a threat to personal privacy? Legal and ethical data privacy concerns arise from an overreliance on technology, nonconsensual surveillance, and the misuse of data collection.

Is losing your individual rights worth city-wide efficiency measures, improved public safety, and sustainability? What legal battles do smart cities face?

Here are some of the largest issues to arise in the legal and ethical debates over smart city privacy.

Consent

Residents of smart cities don’t give consent to data collection, and have limited knowledge of what’s being collected, who has access to their personal data, or how it’s used. This lack of control over the collection and sharing of personal information can feel like an extreme violation of privacy.

However, clear communication and consumer privacy controls can help to reduce these concerns.

Data Collection

As private contractors and other companies are often involved in smart city projects, monetized data collection can occur and can violate citizen privacy mandates. This collected data might become vulnerable to data breaches and other cyber threats, such as ransomware and IoT attacks.

Without transparent cybersecurity protocols in place, your personal data may be vulnerable to an attack, simply because you reside in a smart city.

Lack of Regulations

Currently, there aren’t any federal laws in the U.S. that regulate smart city privacy. The personal privacy regulations vary from state to state and even from city to city. Although Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) offer consumers some control over data collection and data removal, neither law covers every aspect of smart city technology.

Each smart city might implement its own laws, and without universal rules and regulations in place, consumers may not be aware of (and may have limited control over) their privacy rights.

Surveillance

Smart cities often use data analytics and AI-powered tools for surveillance. This may include biometric data collection, city-wide cameras, sensors, and IoT devices that collect physical and behavioral data about citizens.

Surveillance data can provide insights for emergency services and law enforcement response time improvement and enhance urban planning. However, these tools have been found to hold biases that can lead to profiling, and constant surveillance can be a slippery slope to police state-like governance.

Unregulated surveillance can also lead to a violation of an individual’s constitutional rights, especially the Fourth Amendment.

Smart city privacy protection by regularly updating software and security features on connected devices.

How you can protect your privacy in smart cities

Whether or not you live in a region that has implemented smart city initiatives, proactively taking steps to protect your digital privacy is vital in an increasingly online world.

Here are some of the steps that you can take to ensure your privacy protections are secure:

Use strong passwords and multi-factor authentication for all smart devices: Ensure your devices are password-protected by regularly using a combination of upper and lower case letters, numbers, and symbols to create unique passwords. Enable multi-factor authentication (MFA) when you have the option to do so.
Familiarize yourself with your city’s data policies: If you live in a smart city, you should be able to access all data privacy policies and procedures. Make sure you understand what protections are in place and how policies will impact your life. If you have concerns, report them to your local city government.
Avoid Public WiFi Networks:It’s a good idea to avoid public WiFi networks even if you aren’t residing in a smart city. These networks are not secure and can expose your devices to malware, phishing scams, and other cyber threats. In public settings, you can use a Virtual Private Network (VPN) such as IPVanish or Surfshark to use the Internet anonymously and securely to limit the personal data smart city devices can collect from your online activity.

Smart technologies can increase efficiency, safety, and sustainability. However, it also creates significant risks for personal privacy rights. The balance between innovation and individual rights is crucial to smart city privacy. Ultimately, the future of smart cities will depend on finding a middle ground where technology works for the people, rather than against them.

For more on smart city privacy and other cybersecurity tips, visit the What Is My IP Address blog or listen to the Easy Prey Podcast available to stream on your favorite podcast platforms.