Shedding Light on Smart City Privacy Visual Guide

Shedding Light on Smart City Privacy is a visual and interactive tool that helps citizens, companies, and communities understand the technologies at the heart of smart city and smart community projects – and their potential impact on privacy. It also connects stakeholders with guidance documents, best practices, and other resources designed to help them implement new technologies in privacy-protective ways.

Cities and communities generate data through a vast and growing network of connected technologies that power new and innovative services ranging from apps that can help drivers find parking spots to sensors that can improve water quality. Such services improve individual lives and make cities more efficient. While smart city technologies can raise privacy issues, sophisticated data privacy programs can mitigate these concerns while preserving the benefits of cities that are cleaner, faster, safer, more efficient, and more sustainable.

This tool highlights:

• The wide range of connected technologies and services appearing throughout our communities – everything from streetlights that measure air and noise pollution to smart electric grids to buses that re-route based on demand.
• Data privacy concerns raised by these new technologies and services, including surveillance, data spills, unexpected uses, open data, discrimination, and data quality.
• Data privacy tools that help mitigate these risks, including robust privacy program management, transparency and consent, local storage, data minimization, vendor management, and de-identification.
• Privacy-related guidance documents, best practices, codes of conduct, reports, and other resources that can help local policymakers, technologists, and citizens navigate complex privacy issues.