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Comment by ilaksh | Hacker News Reader

To me the most of the ways that I can think of a city being smart are not related to surveillance.

If there is some system that is supposed to benefit the public then its designs should be public and subject to public approval.

What would be reasonable would be something like open source designs and protocols and maybe an electronic bidding system for projects.

But it sounds like its one company embedding whatever spy-tech they want and controlling everything over a large area behind closed doors.

I actually am really looking forward to smart cities. But smart as in high tech and advanced, not smart as in monopolistic surveillance dystopia.

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Pretty harsh:

> Last year, the firm's own privacy adviser Dr Ann Cavoukian resigned. "I imagined us creating a smart city of privacy, as opposed to a smart city of surveillance", she said bluntly in her resignation letter.

Her background is impressive. It's refreshing to see ethics. Also, this quote;

> Former Blackberry co-CEO Jim Balsillie called the project “a colonizing experiment in surveillance capitalism.”

https://globalnews.ca/news/4579265/ann-cavoukian-resigns-sid...

There is no difference between those last two things. Every time someone talks about a Smart City, I keep thinking back to the horrifying Secret Project video from Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri - "The Self-Aware Colony". That's what I fear life will be like in a "Smart City".

We Must Dissent

I think surveillance could be part of a smart city. But for that to be smart it would have to solve the inherent problems with surveillance. An actual smart city project would proudly announce what it did to solve these challenges.

I don't see anything on their website that does this, rather it talks about how developers can enjoy access to ubiquitous connectivity [0]. This is in stark contrast to other successful initiatives like Vision Zero that started with trying to define the fundamental problems.

[0] https://sidewalktoronto.ca/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/Sidewa... [1] https://www.monash.edu/muarc/archive/our-publications/papers...

> solve the inherent problems with surveillance

Which problems?

A simple search can summarize better than I can. There are many sources, including papers and books, for this.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surveillance_issues_in_smart_c...

Oh, I misunderstood. I thought there were problems to be solved in surveillance, not with surveillance. I didn't know that wasn't considered the main drive behind smart cities by everybody.

Surveillance already exists. Cameras and sensors are everywhere in any modern city. Selling that data off to Google to do god knows what with it is the issue. Ofcourse I live in a country with a reasonably well functioning government. They can run a smart city without whoring themselves out to Silicon Valley.

Most smart city stuff is ridiculously unsexy, and also isn’t a privacy concern if you don’t allow the underlying databases to he released or joined together.

Here is an example that can drastically lower waste collection costs, and eventually track weekly trends in refuse generation (by putting a scale in the garbage truck), etc:

https://litumrfid.com/waste-management-rfid-system/

Providing such technologies to existing firms that periodically re-bid for government contracts with makes much, much more sense than handling a permanent monopoly over management of the entire city to a for-profit company that will design things to ensure they can never be replaced.

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