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Literature review: Privacy in Smart Cities

Written by: Hannan Afifi

MSc Student of KIC Inno energy, Energy for Smart Cities
KTH Royal Institute of Technology

Introduction
The growth of urban population lately has increased significantly. Noted in 2014, 54% of
the total global populations live in urban area, increasing from 34% in 1960, and this will
continuously climb up (WHO, 2014). This growth certainly will create challenges and
opportunities for the cities. The needs of the social participation will increase, and the demand of
education and health care shall reach into higher level and easily accessible, social ecosystem
and demographic will have to develop, urban planning and environment will have to be more
sustainable and economies activities should be growing faster. Therefore, in order to face these
challenges, cities have to become smart by aiming better services and more sustainable life for
the habitants.

Concept of Smart Cities

The concept of smartness in the cities, however, has been discussion among the experts.
There are a lot of indicators and definitions why city is smart, both from academic and
practical/cities point of view. Most of the concept proposed, stating that implementation of ICT
infrastructures is the key element in developing smart cities, while some other researcher also
believe that social, education and environmental are also important factors to developing urban
growth (Caragliu et al, 2011).
From academic point of view, Griffinger and Gudrum argue that smart city should be
demonstrating properly in governance, economy of people, mobility and also living environment
in futuristic and modern way and also developing collaboration of contributions and activities of
the aware, independent and self-decisive citizens (Giffinger & Gudrum, 2010). Another
definition by Hall, explaining that Smart cities can be also defined as urban center which is
secure, environmentally green and efficient and using sophisticated technology such as
electronics, sensors and networks to evolv sustainable economic development and good life
quality (Hall, 2000).
From citys standpoint, Amsterdam city declares as smart city which aim to tackle the
climate challenges by using innovative technology and willingness to change energy
consumption (Amsterdam Smart City, 2009). In the other side, Siemiatycki implies that Brisbane
city has 10 years vision to become smart city in order to evolve information access, live long
learning, the digital divide, social inclusion and economic development (Cited in Holland, 2008).
Department of Business and Innovation of UK also indicates that there are 5 important points to
create city to be smarter: sophisticated digital infrastructure, acknowledgment of citizen centric
as method to improve service delivery, an smart hard infrastructure, responsiveness to learn from
others and attempt new system, and lucidity of result (Department of Bussiness & Innovation of
UK, 2013).
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Although there are many definition of smart cities, however, those concepts are basically
not infallible and still obscure (Caragliu et al, 2011). Rather than static definition, the smartness
concept of the city is more to the process how the city to become habitable, stable and capable to
respond new challenges fast. Moreover, Smart Cities have to allow citizens to be involved and
more active in both private and public services in their own best way regarding their needs.
Smart cities are designed using physical infrastructure, modern ICT and high-tech devices, and
human capital to improve economic, urban development, and culture and also approach
sustainable social and environment. Therefore, although the role of ICT in smart city is
mandatory, the label smart city can not be easily given to the city by only implementing modern
infrastructure of ICT (Holland, 2008).

Privacy challenges in Smart Cities

With the use of ICT infrastructure as primary component of Smart City, privacy becomes
more essential for people to take a part in activities in building Smart City. A smart city will
enormously use data and information that can be gathered, observed, combined and analyzed.
This necessarily increases attention about privacy. Essentially, smart cities also enable
government to access the data from the citizen about their activities, economic transactions and
movements although they are not intentionally uploading it. System such as CCTV, for example,
will continuously capture and stream image in detail of a person which can be used to analyze
the behavior of individual live. Another example is RFID technology that is embedded in
transport card (such as SL card in Sweden or OV chip card in Netherlands) which is giving log
information about history and current position of personal movement.
The relationship between government, private sector as third party and citizens is
basically one of center point in overcoming problem of privacy in smart cities. The involvement
of the citizens as one of the element of smart city will be increasing if government can make
citizen safe to give their data. Citizens will only be willing to give their private data if they feel
their personal information will not be misused and spread out by third party since citizens
usually have only minor actual control over how third party gather, exploit and disclose their
private data (Asay et al, 2013). Furthermore, basically third party can also create privacy harm to
citizens. There are two type of harm of privacy caused by third party according to Rian Calo:
Subjective and Objective Harm. Subjective harm is harm which may affect from perception of
unwanted surveillance or sense of powerless over control of private data about oneself while
objective happened when their information may be exploited to against them in unforeseen,
forced way (Asay et al, 2013).
The next challenges in the privacy in smart cities is also about how people define privacy
since definition of privacy is very subjective and personal. Privacy can mean all the identity
information for a person but can only mean specific personal information for another person.
Moreover, people reactions about privacy are different. There are, at least, three types of people
reaction about privacy: Those who react negatively about any privacy data questions, those who
do not care about privacy, and those who will think and consider carefully to give about their
personal data (Directorate for Internal Police European Parliament, 2011). Consequently, there is
challenges to identify whether a data contains privacy or not. For instance a picture captured by
the cop to recognize the intruder in a public disturbance might be considered as privacy while
picture captured by journalist without aiming of recognizing individual might not. Therefore,
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good concept of policies, regulations, and systems must be applied in order to achieve
endorsement of smart cities concept and trust about privacy data from citizens.
In the paper written by Bartoli et al, They establish privacy in the smart cities into four
components: Privacy of personal information which contains privacy of any information of
individual which can be recognized immediately or implicitly based on reference of
identification number or another specific information such as her/his location, background,
mental, physical, physiological, cultural, or economic; Privacy of person which is the privilege
to adjust entireness of her/his own body such as health problem, specific medical treatment and
devices, and also special physical needs; Privacy of personal behavior that is privilege of a
person to keep any information about their actions and selection from being spread; and Privacy
of personal communication which is due of a person to communicate without being monitored ,
stalked and censored (Bartolie et al,2011). Nevertheless, Bartoli also states that existing policy
and regulation of smart cities only considers about privacy of personal information, even though
the other privacy components also must be taken into account, especially when the diversity of
data type used is getting bigger (such as electronic signature and biometrics) (Bartoli et al, 2011)
Another discussion about privacy challenges is about data security. High speed internet
connection of the smart cities, complexity of interconnection of smart citys system, and also big
data processing will magnify vulnerability of the system from catastrophic system failure and
also wicked attack from the hacker. For those reasons, cyber data security must be considered as
one of the defiance of privacy in smart cities that must be tackled. Besides, data security has to
protect not only from purposeful attack like industrials spy, terrorist and from their dissatisfied
worker but also from accidentally harm of the data infrastructure caused by equipment failures,
user errors, and also natural disaster. According to Networks European Technology Platform
(NET Platform), security challenges in smart cities can be derived into two points:
Interconnectedness of smart cities systems and capacity of data used in smart cities (NET
Platform, 2011).
Smart Cities system consist of a lot of systems which are totally dedicated for
heterogonous aim (e.g waste management, energy usage, etc). The interconnection of those
systems surely will create system inside of system which makes complexity increases
exponentially. As consequence, the system protection will also be more complex and more
vulnerable compare to single system. Thereof, NET platform suggested to conduct research
about complexity of security system which contains cost efficiency and interfere endurance,
breakthrough of dynamic trust model for assuring interaction of inter-system, noetic and
complete security policy languages, self-monitoring system and also enhancement of how to
design privacy and security in complex and interconnectedness system (NET Platform, 2011).
Second point of security challenge in smart cities is capacity of data used. As the
complexity of system in smart cities develop, the amount of user and quantity of the data also
rise up. This creates problem about management of privacy when original identity from user
must be separated from data collected (pseudonymisation). Furthermore, in order to minimize the
number of private data used as much as possible without reducing quality of service, advance
security technologies such as intelligent data aggregation and advance encryption must be
installed into systems (NET Platform, 2011).
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Conclusion
The concept of smart cities has been developing as city is getting more complicated.
Although ICT implementation is one of the main value of smart cities, but that has to be
followed with smartness concept in order to build real smart cities (Cited in Caragliu et al,
2011). However, Implementation of ICT in smart cities also creates challenges about privacy of
data. As mentioned clearly earlier, one of the problems in smart is privacy threat created to
citizens by third parties. This threat can be categorized into subjective and objective threat.
Another challenge in privacy in smart cities is also to determine if a data contains privacy or not.
Finally, technical challenge in privacy of smart cities is to create better data security as the
interconnection of smart cities system is more complex and volume of data used is getting bigger
(NET Platform, 2011)

References
1. World Health Organization, 2014, Urban Population Growth. Available from:
<http://www.who.int/gho/urban_health/situation_trends/urban_population_growth_text/e
n/>. [Accessed 17 September 2014]
2. A. Caragliu, C. Del Bo, P. Nijkamp 2011, Smart Cities in Europe, Journal of Urban
Technology, 18(2), p.65-82.
3. Giffinger, R.; Gudrun, H 2011, Smart cities ranking: an effective instrument for the
positioning of the cities?, ACE: Architecture, City and Environment, vol. 4, n 12, p. 7-26
4. Hall, R. E. 2000, The vision of a smart city, Proceedings of the 2nd International Life
Extension Technology Workshop, Paris, France, Sept. 28.
5. Amsterdam City, 2011, Amsterdam Smart City. Available from:
<http://hollandtour.org/amsterdam-smart-city-asc.html>. [Accessed 20 September 2014]
6. R.G. Hollands 2008, Will The Real Smart City Please Stand Up? Intelligent,
Progressive, or Entrepreneur-ial? City12:3 (2008) 303320.
7. Department for Business and Innovation of UK 2013, Smart Cities: Background Paper
October 2013 , London, Available from :
<https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/246019/b
is-13-1209-smart-cities-background-paper-digital.pdf>.[Accessed 20 September 2014]
8. A.S. Elmaghraby, M.M Losavio 2014, Cyber security challenges in Smart Cities: Safety,
security and privacy, Cairo University Journal of Advance Research, Vol. 5, p.491-497
9. C.D. Asay 2013, Consumer Information Privacy and the Problem(s ) of Third-Party
Disclosures, Northwestern Journal of Technology and Intellectual Property, Vol. 11 n 3,
p 325-340
10. A.Bartholi et al 2012,On the Ineffectiveness of Todays Privacy Regulations for Secure
Smart City Networks, Proceedings of third IEEE International Conference on Smart
Grid Communications (SmartGridComm 2012), Tainan City (Taiwan). 5-8 November
2012.
11. Net!Works European Technology Platform 2011, Smart Cities Application
Requirement :White Paper 20 May 2011,Lisbon, Available from:
<http://www.networksetp.eu/fileadmin/user_upload/Publications/Position_White_Papers/
White_Paper_Smart_Cities_Applications.pdf >. [Accessed 25 September 2014]
12. C.D Balaough 201, Privacy Implication of Smart Meters, Symposium on Energy
Law,Vol 86, p. 161-191