Intelligent Data Security and Privacy for Smart Cities

IntroductIon Smart City governments are struggling with a number of data protection issues, including how to address the security and privacy of Smart City data that is collected and requested by third parties and consumed by cities. Smart governments are not new to managing data amid competing tensions between the delivery of public servces and privacy and public records mandates. But on the whole, that data has either been non-sensitive on its face, clearly exempted from open records disclosure, or relatively straightforward to de-sensitize or redact prior to satisfying disclosure demands. This playbook is becoming outdated with the emergence of Smart City efforts enabled by increased IoT sensor and actuator devices, along with the associated digitization of behavior and information, and the resultant troves of “Big Data”. These capabilities are driving new privacy and security risks for cities that raise questions around rights and obligations in the overall stewardship and management of data between and among citizens, governments, civil society, and private companies. The strategies that cities have used to classify and then manage public and open datasets will not work for datasets that have emergent sensitivities. This article describes an instantiation of a “Data Trust” solution, focused primarily on one prominent type of data encountered by Smart Cities, i.e., location data.