Residents weigh in on data privacy and smart city technologies

By Chelsea McCullough, Smart Cities Connect

AI is increasingly becoming embedded in smart city technologies, but often these integrations are not obvious to the general public. However, the proliferation of Generative AI is making AI systems more accessible and relevant to people and stimulating new questions about data privacy, transparency, and digital rights.

Because urban technologies almost always involve industry-led solutions that operate in the public domain, addressing data ownership and governance issues is complex. Addressing the multi-layered issues surrounding these smart technologies requires thoughtful discussion, ideally between a collaborative group of city leaders, residents, and researchers.

An example of this kind of multi-sector consortium includes a recent effort between the City of Long Beach and California State University Long Beach. The team worked toward the launch of a pilot platform designed to increase transparency with residents about the urban technologies deployed throughout the city. Research led by Dr Gwen Shaffer and her team revealed that residents want to better understand what technologies are being used, for what purposes, and also want more control over how their personal data is being collected and managed. The National Science Foundation (NSF) recently awarded a US$1.5 million grant to expand this research and continue engagement efforts between the city and its residents.

The project extends from the City of Long Beach’s long-term efforts to build trust with residents through communication and education initiatives on urban data and technology. In 2024, the City’s Technology Planning and Partnerships Division set a target for 2,500 interactions with the platform, but the results were more than double. In fact, there were 5,120 combined total scans of the QR codes on signage and website page views that informed residents and visitors about their digital rights.

These successes build on the team’s interactive approach to community engagement founded on four Guiding Principles:

1. Design for equity: reducing historic inequities and disparities by ensuring technology advancements are accessible to all and improve quality of life for communities that have been underserved.
2. Earn public trust: building public confidence through excellence in data privacy, data transparency, and community engagement.
3. Cultivate local expertise: promoting place-based growth by supporting Long Beach entrepreneurs and businesses, improving workforce job-readiness, and building partnership networks.
4. Build civic resilience: improving capacity to respond efficiently and effectively to the most-pressing civic challenges using data-informed decision-making.

The unique collaboration between the City of Long Beach and CalState Long Beach enables new projects and resident-based outcomes. Next steps include the development of a mobile app that residents can download to set their preferences for how their data is accessed and managed by smart city technology. Referred to as a ‘privacy assistant’, the app will establish new precedents for how the community may not only understand what smart city technologies are in use in their city, but also be able to interact with city leadership to share their ideas, experiences, and perspectives. These advancements will support digital privacy efforts around the US!

Photo: Shutterstock via Smart Cities Connect