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2 Eur. Data Prot. L. Rev. 28 (2016)
Privacy, Security and Data Protection in Smart Cities: A Critical EU Law Perspective

handle is hein.journals/edpl2 and id is 34 raw text is: 28 1 Privacy, Security and Data Protection in Smart Cities Privacy, Security and Data Protection in Smart Cities: A Critical EU Law Perspective Lilian Edwards* 'Smart cities' are a buzzword of the moment. However, a growing backlash from the priva- cy and surveillance sectors warns of the potential threat to personal privacy posed by smart cities. Key issues include the lack of opportunity in an ambient or smart city environment for the giving of meaningful consent to processing of personal data; the degree to which smart cities collect private data from inevitable public interactions; the 'privatisation' of ownership of both infrastructure and data; the repurposing of'big data' drawn from IoT in smart cities; and the storage of that data in the Cloud. This paper argues that smart cities thus combine the three greatest current threats to personal privacy, with which regulation has sofarfailed to deal effectively; the Internet of Things (JoT) or 'ubiquitous computing'; 'Big Data'; and the Cloud. I will discuss how and if EU data protection law controls possible threats to personal privacy from smart cities and given legal inadequacy, suggest further re- search on a number of solutions. I. Introduction 'Smart cities' are a buzzword of the moment. Al though legal interest is growing, most academic re sponses at least in the EU, are still from the techno logical, urban studies, environmental and sociologi cal rather than legal, sectors1 and have primarily laid emphasis on the social, urban, policing and environ mental benefits of smart cities, rather than their chal lenges, in often a rather uncritical fashion2. Howev er a growing backlash from the privacy and surveil lance sectors warns of the potential threat to person Professor of E-Governance, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow. My thanks to Anastasia Gubanova, LLM candidate at the University of Strathclyde, for helpful and timely research assistance; and to CREATe and the Horizon Digital Economy Hub at Nottingham for helping sponsor the international conference, Designing Smart Cities? Opportunities and Regulatory Challenges, Strathclyde, April 2015 from which many insights were drawn for this paper. A full web resource of the conference can be found at http://www.cre- ate.ac.uk/blog/2014/11/06/designing-smart-cities/ and papers from the conference were published as a special edition of the journal of Society for Computers and Law (SCL Journal, vol 26, issue 2, June 2015/July 2015 (http://www.scl.org/site.aspx?i-is43131 ) some of which are referred to below. My thanks also to Lachlan Urquart (doctoral candidate, Horizon) who provided enormously useful research assistance for the conference, and editorship for the special edition; to all the speakers at the conference, whose expertise has helped me accelerate up my learning curve about al privacy posed by smart cities3. A key issue is the lack of opportunity in an ambient or smart city en vironment for the giving of meaningful consent to processing of personal data; other crucial issues in clude the degree to which smart cities collect private data from inevitable public interactions, the 'privati sation' of ownership of both infrastructure and data, the repurposing of'big data' drawn from IoT in smart cities and the storage of that data in the Cloud. This paper, drawing on author engagement with smart city development in Glasgow as well as the re sults of an international conference in the area curat smart cities; and particularly to Francesco Sindico (also of Strath- clyde) who took charge of the environmental and energy side of the conference. Finally thanks are owed to the participants in the Amsterdam Privacy Law Scholars Conference 2015 where this paper was workshopped, especially Bert-Jan Koops and Eleni Kosta, and to Daithi MacSithigh for helpful reading and comments. See discusion in Annalisa Cocchia, Smart and Digital City: A Systematic Literature Review ( Springer 2014); also overview in the leading text Anthony Townsend, A Smart cities : big data, civic hackers, and the quest for a new utopia (W W Norton and Co 2014). 2 Rob Kitchin's Programmable City project (n 105) and Adam Greenfield (n 26) are outstanding counter-examples however. 3 See, eg David Murakami Wood's surveillance studies Ubicity project at Queens Ontario (n 105). EDPL 112016

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