The bitter campus privacy battle over smart building sensors

The funny thing about these smart city projects is that there's a real discussion about privacy and it's a very bad indicator for the technology. No one really objects to the fact that everyone today walks around attached to a microphone, camera, and GPS sensor. Hell, half the people are wearing a device that'll track their heart rate. People have essentially shown that the don't care much about theoretical privacy concerns. Here in the UK we've got bloody CCTV everywhere too and the only technical thing preventing that being used to create a total police is that by and large the cameras are a smattering of cheap diverse products that are often not networked and certainly aren't co-ordinated very well.

Also in terms of these sensors in the office? That battle was lost long ago! The pandemic saw a huge swathe of employers just straight up install spyware on all their employees devices.

So why is there a discussion about privacy here? Because the actual smart sensors aren't doing anything of value! The privacy advocates cry "you're taking our privacy" and the researchers should be saying "But look at the amazing things we can do!" but in reality, there's not much interesting they're achieving with them so it's a difficult argument to have.

I think all public spaces should have some kind of sensors that would inform you (maybe roughly) how many people are in the space and what the current air quality and volume levels are.

I don't have strong opinions about private offices/spaces.

The fact that this got IRB approval is astonishing.