Smart Cities and Privacy: A Choice, Or Not?

Friends,

Moderating the Bay area Cybersecurity Symposium for Smart Cities event last week made me think deeper about privacy and security. Here's my three minute kick off keynote. I hope it makes you think too.

As long as we are all thinking continuously, we can solve challenges.

Have a great day!

Transcript of these remarks, originally delivered at the Cybersecurity Symposium For Smart Cities 2020 by Adaptable Security on October 15, 2020.

Welcome to Cybersecurity Symposium For Smart Cities. We welcome you to join us in this very complex conversation. We encourage everyone in all sectors private, public, NFP, educational institutes and citizens to come together, volunteer and make decisions. 

Smart Cities, means a city using multiple devices connected to make choices.

Cities use connected technology and data to improve efficiency, safety and increase prosperity for residents and businesses.  While this wonderful it also creates new challenges for us all.

Thank you to Lan Jenson and the Adaptable Security team. Because of your efforts we get three days of SME knowledge and opinions. As an SME myself, representing the 1% of women who are Founding CEO’s of tech companies, I care tremendously about this topic both for my teammates and for the human race overall.

What is privacy? - We talk about privacy all the time and I often find that when I ask what is privacy, people pause and usually go right to information privacy. A sign of the times. :) When I think about privacy, I see privacy as living free from being observed or disturbed by other people (think surveillance, confidentiality, and choice).

Information privacy is having control over how your personal information is collected, how it's used, who can use it and for how long they can use it.

When I hear Smart Cities and privacy, I don't take smart to mean intelligent. What's smart for me doesn't have to be smart for you and that's where the privacy question comes into the equation. Do we truly have a choice or not?

Is it smart to sacrifice safety and convenience for some level of privacy? Do we have a choice? Our privacy is our personal currency and today we don't have much control over when it is used, how it is used, by whom it is used and for how long it is used. In Smart Cities, safety and convenience feels like an automatic opt-in. Enabling one or many algorithms allows others to control our privacy.

For example, smart cities use automated tolls and parking. I drove into the city in a blue BMW and parked on the street. In speaking this sentence there is little impact on privacy.  However, when you consider the algorithms that are analyzing data: the make, model, color, person driving, passengers (registered vehicle or cameras in tolls) are all collected. I didn’t have the choice to be observed and yet my privacy will be disturbed as this information is fed into algorithms that will be used to make assumptions about me. 

Who is writing these algorithms? Are there any women on these teams? That's what I think about. What are the biases of the people who are writing the algorithms if only 22% of AI professionals are female and 78% are male (according to the World Economic Forum)? What are their biases towards privacy? Men and women have different privacy concerns, take the human body for example, both physically and medically. Women have different privacy issues from men. Smart cities must  protect privacy in general and we must ask, is intelligence in place to adjust for the privacy differences between the genders?

Thank you friends,

Deidre