Walking the Datafied City

The next session at AoIR 2022 is on data infrastructures, and begins with Jonas Breuer, whose interest is in data protection in smart cities. Smart cities collect a substantial volume of often personal data all of the time, and the implementation of these data technologies needs to be thought through carefully; this project explored these issues through data walks in Belgian cities.

’Smart’ cities are often much less amazing than they sound, but Internet of Things technologies are now everywhere – there are even ‘smart’ rubbish bins, even if they don’t seem to work especially well just yet. In Europe, their data capture activities are intended to help with safety and real-time decision-making processes, but this also poses risks to the rights and freedoms of citizens, and may conflict with data protection rights especially under the GDPR.

Other laws also come into play here: they include the need for a lawful basis for processing (not just consent); the right to be informed; various data subject rights; and data protection impact assessments. There is a need to balance the risks and benefits of such smart city technologies, therefore, and data subjects – citizens – should be actively involved in these processes.

What Jonas calls ‘walkshops’ – walks through public spaces to increase data capture awareness and literacy and explain these complex topics – might be one solution to these challenges, but reaching all layers of society is difficult. Walkshops do provide a low-threshold method for citizen involvement, though, and provide an embodied experience for participants.

Jonas’s project conducted 14 such walkshops in Belgian cities together with civil society organisations, involving more than 100 citizens and feeding their observations back to city decision-makers as well. Risks identified from this work are the chilling effect of data capture technologies on civic participation (e.g. protests and demonstrations), the misuse of data, data breaches, commercial exploitation of data, IT pollution, function creep, etc.

Citizens also felt that they were not sufficiently informed, did not engage with the available information (or were overloaded by it), felt more anxiety after being informed, or sometimes just didn’t believe the information available. At the same time, they also didn’t see the efficacy of such data technologies in improving cities.