Big Data, Smart Cities, and Personal Privacy

When cities track their citizens transit, video tape their movements, and document their involvement in criminal cases, they collect data that could be sensitive or personally damaging. To protect their citizens, cities try to 'anonymize' their data, but according to Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society that's easier to say than do. "Problematically, most privacy frameworks focus on 'identifying and removing personally identifiable information' — but because so much data is now available from so many sources, hackers (or others with ill intent) could potentially use a piecemeal approach to identify individuals, even if the data sets are made anonymous," reports Rachel Dovey in Next City.

The privacy issue is exacerbated as cities and private companies continue to collect more and more data, and the best practices around this kind of data collecting are evolving with the technology or in some cases, unknown to those doing the collecting. "'Today, data is plentiful but insight is far less common,' Jane Wiseman wrote for another paper on CDOs," Dovey reports.