Cities collecting personally identifiable data, by the government or through any third party, are responsible to abide by the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) rules, just like any other organization collecting data.
The GDPR regulation, which will be fully enforceable from May 20, 2018, was widely discussed in the last Mobile World Congress in Barcelona and is a recurring topic in many forums and at board level meetings of the largest U.S. and European organizations.
Cities are liable for sensor data
The amount of data collected by cities will increase tenfold in the next six years.
According to Jorge Ortega, a lawyer from Barcelona specializing in data protection, and president of the expert committee of ANF (Data Protection Certification Authority) in Spain, “City councils are responsible for all data collected by all IoT devices in public spaces, and the use of that data. If a light sensor detects the movement of cars entering or leaving a parking garage, and therefore the movement of its residents, their privacy needs to be protected by default.”
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