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Will 'Smart Cities' Violate Our Privacy? (computerworld.com)
An anonymous reader quotes Computerworld's article on the implications of New York City's plan to blanket the city with "smart" kiosks offering ultrafast Wi-Fi.
The existence of smart-city implementations like Intersection's LinkNYC means that New Yorkers won't actually need mobile contracts anymore. Most who would otherwise pay for them will no doubt continue to do so for the convenience. But those who could not afford a phone contract in the past will have ubiquitous fast connectivity in the future. This strongly erodes the digital divide within smart cities. A 2015 study conducted by New York City found that more than a quarter of city households had no internet connectivity at home, and more than half a million people didn't own their own computer...
Over the next 15 years, the city will go through the other two phases, where sensor data will be processed by artificial intelligence to gain unprecedented insights about traffic, environment and human behavior and eventually use it to intelligently re-direct traffic and shape other city functions... And as autonomous cars gradually roll out, New York will be well positioned to be one of the first cities to legalize them, because they'll be safer thanks to 5G, sensors and data from all those kiosks.
Intersection, a Google-backed startup, has already installed 1,000 of the kiosks in New York, and is planning to install 7,000 more. The sides of the kiosk have screens which show alerts and other public information -- as well as advertisements, which cover all the costs of the installations and even bring extra money into the city coffers.
New York's move "puts pressure on other U.S. cities to follow suit," the article also points out, adding that privacy policies "are negotiated agreements between the company and the city. So if a city wants to use those cameras and sensors for surveillance, it can."
Over the next 15 years, the city will go through the other two phases, where sensor data will be processed by artificial intelligence to gain unprecedented insights about traffic, environment and human behavior and eventually use it to intelligently re-direct traffic and shape other city functions... And as autonomous cars gradually roll out, New York will be well positioned to be one of the first cities to legalize them, because they'll be safer thanks to 5G, sensors and data from all those kiosks.
Intersection, a Google-backed startup, has already installed 1,000 of the kiosks in New York, and is planning to install 7,000 more. The sides of the kiosk have screens which show alerts and other public information -- as well as advertisements, which cover all the costs of the installations and even bring extra money into the city coffers.
New York's move "puts pressure on other U.S. cities to follow suit," the article also points out, adding that privacy policies "are negotiated agreements between the company and the city. So if a city wants to use those cameras and sensors for surveillance, it can."
Question answered. Move along now...
Here's a Larry Niven novel (I haven't read it, unfortunately) in which the inhabitants are "sacrificing privacy - there are cameras (not routinely monitored) even in the private apartments - in exchange for security" (Wikipedia).
Unfortunately, due to the vast amounts of data collected on us by myriad gadgets (smartphones, Alexa, cell phone towers, public cameras, private cameras with Geo tagged data on social media, credit card machines, ATMs... perhaps even smart parking meters!), it appears as if we've already sacrificed privacy. Have we gotten more security? Honestly, maybe, aren't crime rates supposed to be down?
Duh.
You want to know the information that's never abused, and never hacked? The _information you never gather._
http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
Any headline that contains a question can be answered with no.
The answer is no. Smart cities will not violate our privacy.
You can not have smart cities without smart voters. Trump prives we do not have smart voters.
âoeGive me a Tic Tac so I can grab a pussyâ
- President Trump
Nope, unless your offline like Toe Cheese Stallman, your privacy has been gone for a long time.
The Special Law of Betteridge says that any headline that matches the regex "/(will|can).*reduce privacy/i" can be answered with "yes".
New York's move "puts pressure on other U.S. cities to follow suit," the article also points out.
Does it? Of course, says the company pushing it. But not all cities will take the bait. Seattle citizens would probably have a fucking cow; when the city tried to install a mesh network downtown to enhance emergency response, the uproar resulted in all the installed equipment being taken out.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
I have seen several of these kiosks in Manhattan already. They are ugly, most of them in a state of disrepair, and more unresponsive than your grandpa's internet explorer. And I'm a talking about the ones in front of Penn Station. I cannot imagine the ones they will install in the Bronx, or in some other non-central location.
If you want to be useful, just install free wifi repeaters (starting from the goddamn airports, please), like any other civilized city in Asia do.
Has there ever been a city installed WiFi that didn't completely fail to work? I've tried a few. Not even airports can get it right. When a city, town, borough or municipality set out to provide public WiFi, they go on to demonstrate that they don't understand how to deploy RF services and that they don't understand how to maintain an internet service.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
Until the city's AI for whatever reason, classifies your future crime as imminent, or worse, decides your continued existence is no longer useful to it.
The good news, the city rewards it's faithful, it's worshipers.
It will get fun when they de-frost Wesley Snipe and then Sylvester Stallone to run after the psychopathic monster they've unleashed.
Televisions that require the owner to watch a special channel for 5 minutes every day, followed by the owner facing the camera on the TV and then saying "I love Big Brother". While smiling.
Failure to do so will summon the authorities, who will then take the terrorist to a Happy Camp, where the terrorist will either learn to love Big Brother, or they will be executed.
Just a simple thought experiment tells you all you need to know. In scenario one, the sensors are all run by Google and Facebook, in scenario two they are run by the municipality and all the data is open. That's very crude and, in a mixed economy, the ownership is likely to be mixed too, but see below. However, the Roomba discussion provides some indicators about what will eventually happen to data that is in commercial hands.
It's also worth noting that sensor networks and infrastructures are, to some extent rivalrous, in the economics sense. That is, they compete for physical placement, for bandwidth and (probably) for standards and protocols.
There's questions of scope, governance and separation too. For example, I never go into Apple stores and that's a choice, but I may have to go into a hospital. I personally don't mind advertising beacons because I choose not to have a smart phone and don't receive their output. I don't want any of my data sold on, but have zero faith in GAFAM (Google, Amazon, Facebook and Microsoft, as proxies for the usual suspects) not to do that.
I think 'we' can do really good things with city data and wrote about it somewhat in 2009 but that was on the basis of municipal control, public health and ecological objectives. The current picture looks a lot more invasive and murkier.
On y va, qui mal y pense!
In my particular city they are doing it by rolling out hundreds of new cameras as part of 'traffic light upgrades'. Formerly they had to place warnings up at every intersection that had 'red light cameras'. But they are slowly being replaced with live cellular video feeds. Judging by the cameras, either 1080p or 2160p quality (they are MUCH larger than normal webcams, but much smaller than the former 'flash bulb' cameras which provided limited capture within the flash window. Some of the freeway 'traffic cams' were similiar to the old designs but had hardwired feeds to the city police/county sheriff service centers. The new ones, who knows.
Point being: Travel via car in this town is already under almost complete surveillance. While there may be certain areas of town that could be traversed without hitting a single camera, all the major intersections have them now. Combined with the automated license plate tracking software already in service in 'commercial' settings, and given that these cameras are no doubt operated by a 'private company' thus circumventing the laws around law enforcement performing unwarranted surveillance, while being 'acceptable' due to being a public thoroughfare, it can be assumed all that information is being collated and provided to local, if not federal government employees for a monthly service fee with a wing and a nudge for working around that pesky implication of SOME privacy while you travel, now that ubiquitous surveillance is cheap, plentiful, and privately operated and owned.)
And the worst part is: everybody around me thinks it is okay, acceptable, or that I am bad for thinking that some semblance of privacy in one's daily travels should be preferable.
https://www.wired.com/1999/01/...
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
Oh, you mean not every question can be answered with a smug and unthinking "No" hyperlinked to the Wikipedia page for Betteridge's law of headlines?
Remember that next time you pull that crap in response to other questions.
... to "the city that never sleeps"
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
Yes
They already do,
Maybe we should shove it up your ass...
Friend, they already do violate our privacy. There are cameras at every intersection, and everywhere else (ATM cameras, security cameras, and so on). Your 'smartphone' has a highly sensitive GPS receiver in it, which (despite any settings of yours to the contrary) is on all the time, can pinpoint your location to within a few meters even deep inside a multi-floor building, and reports that position on demand (or all the time for all anyone knows). Even without GPS your position can be determined by triangulating from cell towers. Any WiFi that your phone connects to, even briefly, can be used to geolocate you. Unless you pay cash for everything walking around, your purchases not only pinpoint your location, they add to a list of your purchasing habits, from which your behavior can be predicted. If you live in a big urban city like New York and take a cab everywhere, your movements are tracked that way, too. There are microphones all over the place that are part of a gunshot detection/location system, and for all we know those are also used to listen in on people in public; leveraging your smartphone to listen in on you is a trivial task, too. Having free WiFi all over a city like New York, that enables anyone to have Internet access for free wherever they go in the city is just the final nail in the coffin of your privacy; you're now 'connected' everywhere you go, watched, and listened to in redundant ways. Not carrying a smartphone and paying for everything with cash isn't even enough and may just flag you as a potential criminal/extremist/terrorist/person of interest. Using the Internet at all these days, even with a VPN, still leaks all sorts of information about you, especially if you're so dumb as to use so-called 'social media', which EXISTS to collect information about you, ostensibly to sell you things, but also so governments can produce a profile/dossier of you -- just in case you're a terrorist. Using Tor is better and worse than a VPN because there are things you just can't do using Tor, and I'm certain it's like that on purpose. The only way you can have any modicum of privacy anymore is to live in the middle of nowhere, have a landline phone and no smartphone, stay off the Internet, and pay for everything you can with CASH, never use credit or plastic or even checks if you can help it, and stay away from urban centers as much as possible. Sadly doing all the above, in the current socio-political climate, will flag you to law enforcement as a potential criminal, extremist, or out-and-out terrorist, and you might well be specifically scrutinized because of it. If you're married and have kids, it's basically impossible to be 'off the grid' unless you're all on on the same page somehow -- and kids especially won't put up with being isolated and ostracized because their dad is a 'nutjob' who won't let then use Facebook or have a smartphone. Basically, until the current socio-political climate changes, you have damned little privacy of any kind, except in your own home, with the blinds shut and no electronics that could listen in on you -- and it's highly unlikely that any time in the near future that any of this is going to change. First people have to WANT it to change. Good luck with that.
Mobile technology is not the same beast as old fashioned phone service, and I don't like the idea of utilizing a strictly public network for it. It would be easier and cheaper to simply enforce some laws and regulate the telcos and service providers. This seems designed to benefit the city of New York, not the people of New York. Regulating data collection would be a huge deal. This is the opposite. This is just thinly veiled surveillance to profit the city, not a humanitarian act or bold act of innovation. Sorry, but there are better ways to go about this, and I sincerely hope the rest of the country pursues those avenues instead. A VPN only gets one so far, if they are even allowed on the public network, and most folks don't have any awareness of those kinds of options. The coasts are more authoritarian (then again, that's where all of the wealth is concentrated) than our central government could ever hope to be, and that's saying something. No, thanks!
In the past few years, I've found more and more people who no longer touch their desktop computer at home. With their smartphone, they have no need for a desktop computer anymore. I'm curious how many of the half a million people mentioned here have smartphones, and how many are old people who are not interested in computers and the Internet.
I think its too late. There are so many forms of surveillance that adding another really won't change things. At this point I think its better to lobby for strong laws to protect how the data is *used*. Trying to control what is collected is a lost cause .
will be able to track you down to the street lamp level. In other news, Big Brother turns green with envy.
Your government is not there to make you money and when it does, you are the one who eventually will suffer.
Don't like your government now, wait until they see you as a product to be bought and sold.
Many states and cities use their police force ticketing to make money for the city, drive through one and see just how bad the policing is. They become more focused on ticket revenue than actually deterring crime, eventually the city starts using it to cover budget shortfalls. Need a small boost, setup a speed trap. Need even more, rig the stoplight to go from yellow to red sooner, or just manually trigger the warning lights near a school to go red and ticket anyone who didn't notice your trickery (Fergusson, Missouri was notorious for this). All these tricks are extremely common throughout the midwest.
Betteridge's Law of Headlines fails here.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
the answer is "of course" since you are the product.
http://archive.ncsa.illinois.e...
Avantgarde Hebrew science fiction