Theo Bass: European laws have ushered in a new era in how companies and governments manage and promote responsible use of personal data. Yet it is the city that looks set to be one of the major battlegrounds in a shift towards greater individual rights, where expectations of privacy and fair use clash with ubiquitous sensors and data-hungry optimised services.

Amid the clamour for ‘smart’ new urban infrastructure, from connected lampposts and bins to camera-enabled phone boxes, a And how do we ensure that its generation and use does not result in discrimination, exclusion and the erosion of privacy for citizens?

While these new sources of data have the potential to deliver significant gains, they also give public institutions – and the technology companies who help install smart city infrastructure – access to vast quantities of highly detailed information about local residents.

A major criticism has been a lack of clear oversight of decisions to collect data in public spaces. US cities have deployed controversial police technologies such as facial recognition without elected officials, let alone the public, being adequately informed beforehand – something which academic Catherine Crump has described as “surveillance policymaking by procurement”.

Meanwhile the digital economy has flourished around urban centres, with new digital platforms creating rich trails of information about our daily habits, journeys and sentiments. Governments often work with app-developers like Waze, Strava and Uber to benefit from these new sources of data. But practical options for doing so in a truly consent-driven way – that is, not simply relying on companies’ long T&Cs – remain few and far between. There’s no simple way to opt-in or -out of the smart city.

Given the increasing tension between increasing ‘smartness’ on the one hand, and expectations of privacy and fair data use on the other, how can city governments respond? In Nesta’s new report, written as part of our involvement with a major EU Horizon 2020 project called DECODE, we looked at a handful of city governments that are pioneering new policies and services to enhance digital rights locally, and give people more control over personal data.

City governments such as Seattle are improving accountability by appointing designated roles for privacy in local government, including both senior leadership positions and departmental ‘Privacy Champions’. The city’s approach is also notable for its strong emphasis on public engagement. Prior to the approval of any new surveillance technology, relevant departments must host public meetings and invite feedback via an online tool on the council’s website.

Elsewhere cities are becoming test-beds for new technologies that minimise unnecessary data collection and boost citizen anonymity. Transport for New South Wales, Australia, collaborated with researchers to release open data about citizens’ use of Sydney’s public transport network using a mathematical technique called differential privacy – a method which makes it difficult to identify individuals by adding random ‘noise’ to a dataset.

Other experiments put more control into the hands of individuals. Amsterdam is testing a platform that allows local residents to be “authenticated but anonymous”. The system, known as Attribute-Based Credentials, lets people collect simple and discrete ‘attributes’ about themselves in an app (like “I am over 18”), which they can use to verify themselves on local government services without revealing any more personal information than absolutely necessary.

Not all the policy measures we came across are about privacy and anti-surveillance. Local governments like Barcelona are fundamentally rethinking their approach to digital information in the city – conceiving of data as a new kind of common good.

In practical terms, the council is creating user-friendly ‘data commons dashboards’ that allow citizens to collect and visualise data, for example about environmental or noise pollution in their neighbourhoods. People can use the online tools to share information about their community directly with the council, and on their own terms: they decide the level of anonymity, for instance.

Local authorities are more nimble, and in a better position to test and develop new technologies directly with local residents, than other levels of government. As the tides in the personal data economy shift, it will be cities that are the real drivers of change, setting new ethical standards from below, and experimenting with new services that give more control over data to the people.

Theo Bass is a researcher in government innovation at the innovation charity Nesta.

Photo by Cerillion

The post Essay of the day: Data by the people, for the people: why it’s time for councils to reclaim the smart city appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Want to discover the world around you? Then maybe it’s time you picked up a sensor.

This exciting online course on citizen monitoring and science starts today. The following introduction was written by Drew Hemment and originally published in the Grow Observatory‘s Medium blog.

This is an astonishing, precarious time to be alive. There are little things, close at hand, we can all do to make things better.

The planet is under severe environmental strain, from climate change to biodiversity loss. Yet at the same time, we have abilities to discover and learn about the world around us that would have been unimaginable only a few decades ago.

People, like you and me, can join together with others like us to monitor the environment, to make positive changes locally, and contribute to solving problems globally. There are more and more people getting involved in citizen science, and sharing free and open data. People are coming together to organise at a local level, and to act together to solve issues we ourselves identify and define — we call this citizen sensing.

This is what we are going to explore in the upcoming online course, Citizen Science: Sensing the World.

Observing, understanding and predicting change on the Earth is the focus of ‘big science’ programmes. These include the latest European Space Agency satellite programme, Sentinel-1.

This is also increasingly the focus of community groups, individuals and NGOs, who are taking up newly accessible sensing devices, connected to the Internet, to create and share knowledge on the environment.

These tools are ever closer to hand. Small, hand held, low cost sensors are becoming more available, a growing number of people carry smartphones and tablets. There is also today a movement of people building open tools and platforms, often centred around FabLabs and Makerspaces.

This is inspired by the powerful idea that by making designs, technologies and data ‘free and open’, other people will be able to take our creations, build on them and improve them — and allow us to do the same in turn — so we all benefit.

There are other networks of people, who also care about the land, and who take a bottom up approach to sharing knowledge, and making changes to turn negative impacts into positive change in the environment. Growers and small scale farmers using permaculture and agroecology are examples, where peer to peer, grower to grower knowledge sharing has been central to their approach.

Working together, people who care about the land can make important contributions to science, by “ground truthing” observations by satellites in orbit high above the Earth.

The vision behind citizens’ observatories is immense. It is nothing short of changing humanity’s relationship to the planet we call home. We can all be part of a collective endeavour to understand and care for the planet. We can all be more aware, more knowing, more engaged, closer together as a community, understanding the global picture, and showing better husbandry for our local spaces and environment.

Ultimately this is all about adopting a more responsible relationship to nature. To do this we can nurture enquiring minds, discover a world of incredible knowledge, build our own tools, strengthen communities, and see the benefits of open and shared data and knowledge.

Until a few years ago, Some of the capabilities of satellites up above us, and networked sensors in the ground, were in the realm of science fiction. Suddenly we have the ability to observe what is happening around us at the microscale. We can browse, explore and zoom into the world around us as if it were a search engine or wikipedia for the natural world.

Citizen sensing is a journey not a destination, and still in its early days. There are real challenges in ensuring the quality and validity of the data, so it is trusted by the science community, and so there are tangible impacts people can see on the ground.

There is a lot of work to do to convince everyone it is worthwhile. That goes for the experts who might use this information to make decisions on policy or investment. And for the individuals who collect and also can benefit from the data.

The good news is we are seeing the positive impact on the ground. One example is another project by some of the people in GROW. In Making Sense, citizen scientists gathered data across three cities for 26 months. In Prishtina, Kosovo there is chronic air pollution, but no official monitoring by the government of air quality. Young people came together to monitor air quality and evidenced air pollution at twenty times the recommended WHO level. The direct outcome was a ban on cars in the city centre, and a change to the Constitution of the Republic of Kosovo, which now includes a right to clean air for citizens.

Making Sense has shared its methods and tools in a toolkit for citizen sensing you can download for free.

GROW itself has a big ambition. To improve the accuracy of climate forecasting on drought and floods, to widen use of regenerative food production and soil management techniques, and to help build a movement of people around the world collaborating on shared knowledge and positive action.

We will get there by many small steps. It takes people like you to pick up a sensor and join a citizen science community.

So join us! Learn all about sensing and Earth observation on the Citizen Science: Sensing the World online course from 26 March. Click below.

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