Reversing Citizen Disempowerment while Aspiring for Smart Cities

When we first think of what a smart city means to us as individuals, we are usually imagining ordering citizen services on interactive user interfaces rather than standing in long queues, increased participation in local decision-making through accessible government consultations, and a more effective process of monitoring and analysing data collected from sensors to improve civic amenities. How we define citizen services, civic amenities and the extent of immersive policy design at the local level may be open to debate, but attaining sustainability and resilience across people, processes and technologies lies at the heart of the urban renewal set in motion by the aspiration to become a smarter city. One technology that has been widely embraced in the wake of this aspiration is the deployment of closed-circuit television (CCTV) cameras for public safety reasons across Indian cities. This piece is a brief glimpse into the digital rights concerns brought to the fore by the accelerating trend of keeping citizens’ lives under constant surveillance under the guise of strengthening law and order.

Deploying technology to attempt to resolve a social or economic need has become more broadly accepted since every citizen was given access to the internet, resulting in their being able to learn about how other cities cope with daily issues like private motor vehicle traffic jams, air pollution and crimes against women and gender minorities much more dynamically. This has been bolstered by the proliferation of video-sharing websites, like YouTube, Dailymotion and Vimeo, as well as social media applications, like Instagram, Facebook and Twitter. India’s Smart Cities Mission prioritises sustainable economic growth and the improvement of quality of life through a focus on local development and the harnessing of technology. The rollout of the centralised National Automated Facial Recognition System (NAFRS) to strengthen under-policing across cities, principally through automatic matching of photographs present in existing government databases to CCTV footage, is a form of ‘coerced inclusion’ into state plans to make the urban form smarter.

The expansion of CCTV coverage per square mile across India has been a cause for significant concern because the state is able to act with impunity on what data is collected, transferred and analysed due to a persistent lack of accountability in the operational infrastructure of cities notified as ‘smart’. There are two principal flaws in the notion that these technologies empower citizens by making daily life safer. The first is that facial recognition algorithms have a well-documented track record of reproducing the social biases of their programmers, potentially hindering the principle that every person is entitled to be treated as innocent until proven guilty. This could be mitigated, however, by ensuring that algorithms are audited by a data protection authority or independent third parties, accompanied by laws mandating that datasets used to program them are publicly available as far as lawfully possible so that biases can be more efficiently dealt with.

A second, perhaps more worrying flaw is that institutional arms of the state aren’t usually representative of the community that they are charged with protecting and serving in India. This trend tracks along gender, age and the more politically sensitive religious identity across the largest and most surveilled cities in India – the police are disproportionately comprised of self-identified Hindu men above the age of 30, particularly among the ranks of its leadership. This may have knock-on effects on wider society – companies chosen for public contracts may skew in favour of self-identified Hindu men forming the majority of employees. In an atmosphere shaped by the continuing absence of a data protection law, administrative convenience appears to replicate many of the biases held by those wielding information and communication technology instruments, particularly in the way that data from centralised systems like NAFRS is analysed.

Amar Patnaik wrote in 2020 that any future data protection authority must be entrenched with constitutionally-defined powers to ward off executive and political interference to act an effective guardrail against the kinds of violations of the right to privacy, repeatedly witnessed in the development of 360-degree tracking and profiling systems, like Telangana’s state-wide Samagram infrastructure. This infrastructure system sidesteps the need for citizen consent to automate consolidation of their data in a single system accessible to law enforcement by claiming that citizen was collected prior to the landmark Supreme Court judgement affirming the Right to Privacy in 2017. This model has been enthusiastically embraced by bureaucrats in Delhi obsessed with centralisation, seeking to continuously monitor the economic and social lives of every citizen to ‘improve governance’ by assuming that citizen consent to share data with one government agency automatically applies to all government agencies without further consent requests.

The creation of this National Social Registry remains controversial in its current form as a centralised, cross-linked database with the necessary scale to cover over a billion people. One of the principal architects of this database points out that the bureaucracy tasked with implementing its creation ‘don’t hesitate to show crumbling morality’ and ‘leave dark shadows of corrupt practices’, lending weight to the proposal that privacy safeguards must be urgently designed and integrated into the practice of data collection by cities looking to burnish their smart credentials. The human aspect of the three building blocks (people, processes and technologies) of retrofitting existing urban agglomerations into more sustainable cities must take primacy in the embrace of surveillance capabilities as they expand with the use of data collected through NAFRS and other databases. Protecting the digital rights of every citizen in this way will serve to enhance the basic exercise of freedom of expression that is foundational to the world’s most populous democracy. It'll reinforce the strength of core constitutional principles of transparency and impartiality through the adoption of open data initiatives wherever automation is being used by the state or it's appointed contractors. Deferring action will only exacerbate the compounding issues around citizen disempowerment in our pursuit of smarter cities.