As ‘smart cities’ tools grow nationwide, so do privacy and ethical concerns

After nearly a week of searching for a suspect in the hit-and-run death of an 81-year-old St. Helena, California, woman this summer, ” target=”\_blank”>Florida’s Strategic Highway Safety Plan from 2021 identifies monitoring speed as a proven way to reduce traffic fatalities, and outlines that it will use ITS infrastructure as a countermeasure. The technical systems allow for monitoring without the use of police officers stationed throughout the roadways.

“It allows you to get coverage of that corridor and try to keep speeds at an appropriate level when nobody’s watching, to improve the safety and the survivability at outcomes for say, like for a pedestrian or bicyclist,” Kautz said.

Balakrishnan has been working in IoT and mobile computing for the last two decades, and founded Cambridge Mobile Telematics about 15 years ago. The Cambridge, Massachusetts-based company gathers data from IoT devices like smartphones, connected vehicles, dash cameras and third-party devices to detect driving behavior.

The company works with insurance and auto companies, as well as rideshare companies, to promote safe driving by using data obtained by driving behavior to assess risk, safety, claims, and driver improvement programs. Balakrishnan said the company estimates it helped prevent about 80,000 crashes and about 40,000 serious injuries.

Another form of technology some cities are using is LiDAR, which uses lasers to bounce light off of objects to measure distance. It’s the foundational technology of Ouster, which makes hardware and software, and works with cities on traffic concerns as well as with clients in the security, industrial and automotive industries. The traffic sensors are currently posted at about 250 intersections in California, Florida, Tennessee, Utah and Colorado.

The technology’s lasers bounce heat off objects, and reflect distance back to the sensor. It uses that data to create 3-D anonymous models of the people and vehicles at street level, the Bay Area company’s VP of Smart Infrastructure Itai Dadon said.

“You understand depth, you understand scale, you understand position in space. You don’t have to infer all that like we do with cameras,” he said. “And on top of that, you can do it without invading the privacy of either your employees or the community that you’re servicing.”

Ethical and data privacy concerns 

There are primarily two ways that IoT technologies work — infrastructure or mobile devices. And the factor of whether a user has control over the device is where privacy considerations come into play, Balakrishnan said.

Cambridge Mobile Telematics’ device, which users voluntarily place in their car and communicate with other IoT devices to track their driving, is an example of a mobile device. It’s similar to a wearable fitness tracker that collects data as you workout or sleep, Balakrishnan said.

“You’re using it for yourself. And I don’t think anyone reasonably would apply the word ‘surveillance’ to that,” Balakrishnan said. “If you don’t want it, don’t use it.”

But IoT devices embedded into infrastructure, like cameras or sensors on stop light poles, inductive loops under pavement that detect vehicles at stoplights, or automatic license plate readers, are not something that people opt into.

“If somebody puts a bunch of cameras on the road and they say that this is for measuring your speeding and sending tickets, okay, there’s warnings, and that’s the law, or that’s the way the rules are,” Balakrishnan said. “But now, if somebody took that data and used it for purposes that was not explicitly intended, then one could say, ‘hey, there’s some surveillance happening.’”

The use of these connected cameras and traffic monitoring systems are being applied across the country on a case-by-case basis. Some states, like Maine, ” target=”\_blank”>state supreme court ruled it is unconstitutional to issue traffic violations unless the state can prove the identity of the driver at the time of citation.

It often comes down to the county or municipality, since there is no federal legislation on data privacy in traffic enforcement.

“All cities and municipalities are very different and have slightly different problems, but they all want, at the end of the day … the benefits for the community,” Dadon said. “However, sometimes they lack the understanding of what the technology can actually do, and by wanting to do good, sometimes run a little bit fast.”

That was the case in San Diego, starting in 2016. The city installed 3,200 “smart streetlights” to deter crime and to log data from license plate readers, but citizens grew concerned with privacy, saying the city wouldn’t tell them how the data could be used, and it would be shared with third parties, ” target=”\_blank”>began installing cameras again in 2024.

A perceived benefit of camera traffic surveillance is that fewer traffic stops or direct interactions with police officers could decrease the number of arrests made of people of color. But the technology hasn’t proven to eliminate racial factors. A ” target=”\_blank”>suing the police department after she was wrongfully arrested for a drive-by shooting in 2023 where police incorrectly used data from the city’s automatic license plate reader.

Instead of searching for a reported license plate number in the system, police searched for any plates that belong to white Dodge Chargers, and found one on a camera two miles from the crime scene. The woman they arrested had been recorded driving just blocks from her home, and had no connection to the crime other than the similar make and model of her car.

IoT and privacy legislation 

Because there’s no federal direction on data privacy of smart cities systems, it will continue to be up to cities, or even municipalities, to make their own rules, said Daniel Weitzner, the founding director of the Internet Policy Research Initiative at MIT.

Cities often work with private technology companies to establish these intelligent transportation systems, and have a ” target=”\_blank”>Carpenter v. United States, which refined what access to location data from cell phones is allowed without a search warrant, and This article was originally published by Paige Gross at North Dakota Monitor.