Protection of privacy and personal data in the big data environment of smart cities

Abstract

The project of smart cities has emerged as a response to the challenges of twenty-first-century urbanization. Solutions to the fundamental conundrum of cities revolving around efficiency, convenience and security keep being sought by leveraging technology. Notwithstanding all the conveniences furnished by a smart city to all the citizens, privacy of a citizen is intertwined with the benefits of a smart city. The development processes which overlook privacy and security issues have left many of the smart city applications vulnerable to non-conventional security threats and susceptible to numerous privacy and personal data spillage risks. Among the challenges the smart city initiatives encounter, the emergence of the smartphone-big data-The cloud coalescence is perhaps the greatest, from the viewpoint of privacy and personal data protection. As our cities are getting digitalized, information comprising citizens' behavior, choices, and mobility, as well as their personal assets are shared over smartphone-big data-The cloud coalescences, thereby expanding cyber-Threat surface and creating different security concerns. This coalescence refers to the practices of creating and analyzing vast sets of data, which comprise personal information. In this paper, the protection of privacy and personal data issues in the big data environment of smart cities are viewed through bifocal lenses, focusing on social and technical aspects. The protection of personal data and privacy in smart city enterprises is treated as a socio-Technological operation where various actors and factors undertake different tasks. The article concludes by calling for novel developments, conceptual and practical changes both in technological and social realms. © Author(s) 2021. CC BY 4.0 License.