Face/Off And What Makes Smart Cities Dangerous?
Whose Streets? Our Streets! (Tech Edition) Issue 5
Whose Streets? Our Streets! (Tech Edition) documents trends in the surveillance of public space. Curated by Rebecca Williams and Madeleine Smith as part of "smart city" surveillance research for the Technology and Public Purpose Project at Harvard Kennedy School's Belfer Center. Subscribe now so you don’t miss an issue and help us spread the word to folks who would enjoy this content.
From the Technology and Public Purpose Project: What's so Dangerous About Smart Cities Anyway?
By Rebecca Williams
The Belfer Center, home of the Technology and Public Purpose (TAPP) project, was originally created to analyze dangers posed by nuclear technology. When people ask about my TAPP fellowship, I usually say that I am doing the same analysis, but for “smart cities.” Even for folks not particularly concerned or interested in “smart cities” this usually sounds spicy enough to pique their interest or at least succinctly explain what I am up to. In this blogpost, I’ll provide an update on what “smart city” technology I am considering and some of the potential harms its misuse introduces.
What “Smart City” Technology?
The goal of my research is not to examine any one “smart city” technology (which is an expanding and nebulous list), but rather the tension between increased state data collection to improve civic services and the risks that collection creates. (In this way smart city technology is representative of many public data governance issues to come). The “smart city” themed projects that inspired this research (LinkNYC, Los Angeles’ Mobility Data Specification, San Diego Smart Streetlights, and Sidewalk Toronto) all involved different technologies and civic aims but aroused similar public concerns regarding unprecedented data collection and how that data would be used. While each project surely had nuanced trade-offs, what level of care was not being taken by local governments (and their partner vendors) across these projects to provoke public outcry?
The examination of harms that “smart city” technology might contribute to cannot be examined in a vacuum. The issues raised by these projects are certainly related to the broader Big Tech and privacy regulation debate, but are distinguished from them in that one cannot individually consent or opt-out of their neighborhood. Further, “smart city” technology is increasingly implicated in growing state surveillance capabilities (in the U.S. and abroad), but related policy discussions can miss their role if they focus exclusively on technologies managed by law enforcement agencies or only consider current uses in the United States.
Rather than focusing on a specific technology, how do these technologies, in context with everything else that is happening in the world, potentially contribute to harm? How are “smart city” projects considering harms of further surveilling public spaces? Are relevant “smart city” projects in current surveillance policy discussions? What constituencies are prioritized when deciding if the collective utility of new “smart city” data collection is worth the risks? How can the U.S. Federal Government and U.S. based vendors be responsible global actors given these variable environments?
Potential Harms of Smart City Technology
While some parties will dismiss potential harms of “smart city” technology as alarmist or premature, I see these repeated instances of public pushback as intrinsically legitimate. The widespread implementation of new technologies that ultimately collect personal data throughout public spaces is uncharted territory. I was recently reminded by a colleague that nuclear risks advocates were similarly considered to be extremists before Chernobyl, but were ultimately correct in being fearful of a worst-case scenario. Moreover, thoughtful regulation and management of these technologies must be applied to protect against the potential harms (outlined below), and we must forward plan for the worst-case scenarios of mis-using/mismanagement “smart city” technology in order to safeguard our democracy.
In the spirit of these common public concerns, I have started to outline broad categories of harms that might arise from deploying “smart city” technology. The intent for this framework is for it to evolve into an assessment tool for current practices and guide for future considerations of deploying “smart city“ technology.
Lack of Community Input
Erosion of Privacy and 4th Amendment Protections
Chilling of 1st Amendment Rights
Discrimination / Oppression
Loss of Accountable Government
City Watch
California, U.S. - Smart Air! “An updated air-quality monitoring app covering large swaths of Southern California is combining data streams from both government and crowd-sourced sensors to give readings at the neighborhood level.” [Government Technology]
California, U.S. - “Police in Pasadena, Long Beach pledged not to send license plate data to ICE. They shared it anyway” [LA Times]
Fujisawa, Japan - “Panasonic is testing an autonomous delivery robot in Fujisawa Sustainable Smart Town, the six-year-old urban development initiative in Fujisawa City, Kanagawa Prefecture.” [Cities Today]
Los Angeles, CA, U.S. - “The Urban Air Mobility Partnership bids to ‘educate and engage’ the city’s residents around the introduction of low-noise, electric aircraft by 2023. The programme is a product of a public-private partnership between the Mayor’s Office, the Los Angeles Department of Transportation (LADOT), and Urban Movement Labs (UML).” [Smart Cities World]
Ludhiana, India - Ludhiana has taken “the live feed of CCTV cameras installed by private establishments directly on mobile phones of the SHOs and on the LED screens at police stations.” [Tribune India]
Munich, Germany - “The trial of a blockchain-based smart city infrastructure solution dubbed M-Zone was launched in Munich in November.” [BeInCrypto]
Seoul, Korea - “A state research institute will create the digital twin of a city that would work as a virtual testing environment for various administrative policies without the risk of harming the city's actual infrastructure.” [Aju Business Daily]
Market Watch
Alibaba - “Alibaba Group Holding, in a statement Thursday, said it would not allow any of its technology to be used for targeting specific ethnic groups… after a report from surveillance industry researcher IPVM that claimed Alibaba’s facial recognition technology was capable of specifically identifying people from China’s Uighur ethnic minority.” [CFO Magazine]
DJI - “One of the largest and most popular drone companies in the world — has been added to the US Department of Commerce’s Entity List, designating the Chinese company as a national security concern and banning US-based companies from exporting technology to the company.” [The Verge]
Emerging tech in 2020 - “Drones, thermal imaging and contact tracing got traction in all levels of government as COVID-19 broke down procurement barriers, sped up development and paved the way for getting new tech up and running.” [Government Technology]
Infogrid - “An IoT startup which can retrofit an existing building to make it “smart”, has raised $15.5 million…The Series A funding round was led by Northzone, with participation from JLL Spark, Concrete VC, The Venture Collective, Jigsaw VC, an unnamed real estate investment group.” [Tech Crunch]
Japan government to resell “smart city” systems - “The Japanese government has decided to market the country’s comprehensive technologies and services for “smart cities”, a next-generation city model that optimises the use of cutting-edge telecommunications, to Southeast Asian countries.” [The Phnom Penh Post]
Palantir - “In November 2020, Palantir joined GAIA-X as a proud Day 1 Member. GAIA-X was envisioned as data infrastructure and an open digital ecosystem ‘initiated by Europe, for Europe’” [Palantir Blog h/t @anabmap]
Scooters - “Spin announced this week an exclusive partnership with IoT solutions provider Drover AI to bring its computer vision and machine learning micromobility platform to Spin's scooter fleet. Drover AI's platform, dubbed PathPilot, equips scooters with sensors, a camera and on-board computing power to enable real-time sidewalk or bike lane riding detection and parking validation. The platform is incorporated into the Spin Insight e-scooter monitoring platform, now dubbed Spin Insight Level 2, to inform planning decisions such as bike lane routes.” [Smart Cities Dive]
Policy Watch
California, U.S. - California’s 1st District Court of Appeal vacated a previous opinion that held government use of pole cameras directed at front of a home for 8 months doesn't implicate the 4th Amendment (even after Carpenter) and announced it would rehear the case en banc. [h/t @OrinKerr]
China - “…the discussions around the [Personal Information Protection Law ("PIPL")] draft and the courts’ ruling in the cases brought by citizens against personal information violations would reveal that China’s data protection is faced with many similar challenges shared elsewhere.” [The Diplomat]
Massachusetts, U.S. - “Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker has refused to sign a law banning most government use of facial recognition...Baker said the reform package ‘ignores the important role [facial recognition] can play in solving crime.’ His office told the Globe that he plans to veto the bill if lawmakers don’t make changes.” [The Verge; see related support for section 26 by ACLU-MA, EFF and all 17 Celtics players]
New Orleans, LA, U.S - New Orleans City Council “approved on a 6-1 vote, bans the New Orleans Police Department’s use of four controversial surveillance technologies — facial recognition programs, characteristics tracking systems, StingRay cellular phone surveillance devices and predictive policing software.” [WWNO]
Nigeria - “‘Smart City’ Options: OptimizingReal Estate Development in Nigeria’ suggests coordination amongst all government agencies for ‘smart cities’ that comply with the Nigerian Data Protection Law, potential Data Protection Bill (DPB), 2020, and land use and real estate laws.” [Lexology]
Various EU Cities - “The [EU’s Digital Marketing Act] bans gatekeepers from mixing data from data brokers or their business customers, with the data they collect on their customers.” [EFF]
Various Global Cities - “The World Economic Forum (WEF) is trying to encourage the ethical use of facial recognition technology in the air travel industry.” [Find Biometrics]
Watching the Watchers Watch
Tokyo, Japan - “A year into the coronavirus epidemic, a Japanese retailer has come up with a new take on the theme of facial camouflage - a hyper-realistic mask that models a stranger’s features in three dimensions.” [Reuters]
Los Angeles, CA - “In an excerpt from Sarah Brayne’s new book, a Palantir contractor at the LAPD walks her through using the software to get from the vague hypothetical description of ‘a male, average build, black four-door sedan’ to 13 ‘suspects’ and their DMV photos in less than a minute. The process requires the user to make a series of assumptions, such as the make and year of the car, and relies on a vast array of data.” [Logic Magazine, via Emily and the Upturn newsletter]
Bonus Section...Art Villages to Watch
🎨🏠 Art Village: Next City’s For Whom By Whom covers Mill History an artist village (which includes a tech tool shed maker space) in Macon, Georgia.