Smart City or Surveillance City?
As New Scientist reported, in Toronto and many other cities around the world, ‘smart city’ projects are underway. The concept of infrastructure interconnected by software is not new. Making artificial intelligence (AI) use data to actively improve our daily lives seems like a worthwhile endeavor.
This is not just a futuristic concept, as for the past 12 months, the city of Hangzhou in China has been collaborating with Alibaba and Foxcom to build the “City Brain” project, where AI began running the city. For the past year, the AI has been absorbing every drop of data it could get its hands on virtual. Virtually all residents are tracked; your social media activity, your purchases, your movements, your commutes, everything is uploaded to AI databases, where decisions are made in real time.
The stated goal of the project is to improve life in Hangzhou by enabling artificial intelligence to track traffic, crime, commuting, shopping, interactions, general movements, and much more. Residents were tracked both generally and specifically, with City Brain even connecting to local social media, even tracking their cell phones.
The project has been deemed a huge success and Alibaba is now packaging the system for export to other cities in China and ultimately the rest of the world. After a year with the new system, rush-hour traffic has dropped by 10%, as the system uses hundreds of thousands of cameras spread throughout the city, tracking the movement of nearly every car on the roads. It can instantly detect accidents, blockages, and predict traffic flow 10 minutes in advance, then adjust traffic light patterns to balance the flow. Illegal parking is tracked in real time and the system will even contact individual travelers to offer detours and weather advisories.
Here’s one the police love. If someone breaks the law, he too can be tracked throughout the city before being apprehended by the police. The reality is that a fully ‘smart’ city means almost every aspect of your life is tracked – the privacy issues are huge.
Why does it seem to work so well in Hangzhou? As Alibaba project leader Xian-Sheng Hua put it… “In China, people care less about privacy, which allows us to move faster.”
“It’s easy to identify when people aren’t following ‘normal’ behavior patterns. Having identified people who aren’t ‘normal’, you can of course track them, and you can also know who they meet, where they go, etc. quickly identified,” says Paul Bernal of the University of East Anglia, UK. “As a way to control dissident movements or anything the authorities don’t like, it’s perfect.”
According to the Gartner Group, an estimated 2.3 billion connected things will be used in smart cities this year, an increase of 43% over 2016. This increase in digital connectivity also exposes a host of vulnerabilities that cybercriminals will line up to detect. blow.
In the video game Watch Dogs, you get to play a hacker who takes over the core operating system of a hyper-connected, futuristic Chicago. Once he has control of the city’s security system, he can spy on residents using surveillance cameras, intercept phone calls, and cripple the city’s critical infrastructure, bringing the city to its knees.
While Watch Dogs is just a game, it illustrates a scenario that could play out in today’s increasingly smart cities. A major attack on the Internet infrastructure in the US recently occurred with one of the largest DDoS attacks ever recorded. The root cause was traced to overlooked security vulnerabilities in millions of compromised connected video cameras. Similar Internet of Things (IoT)-enabled cameras and sensors are driving the Smart City initiative that relies on these devices to manage city-wide infrastructure and assets. Essentially, this dependency suggests that even the smallest security weaknesses within the smart city infrastructure can escalate security exploitation to unimaginable and uncontrollable levels.
We are becoming a society that is increasingly willing to have our every move and conversation monitored for the perceived desirability of a ‘safer’ and more efficient city. We are giving up our individual rights and freedoms so that big government can better protect us.
It’s a timely thought, as we recently had Remembrance Day in Canada and Memorial Day in the United States. These days we honor those who gave their lives to protect our rights and freedoms. The question going forward is, have we become too eager to give up those rights and freedoms so many have died to preserve, simply to make our lives more convenient? A smart city is, in reality, a surveillance city, where the privacy of citizens is the cost of efficiency gains.
Stay tuned!