Bookmarked Imagining a “smart city” that treats you as a sensor, not a thing to be sensed (by Cory Doctorow)
Cory Doctorow formulates something that I think can go onto every list of principles organisations I work with formulate for smart cities, as well as the many data ethics discussions I sit in on.
Don’t track people, help people track the environment to feed their decisions. This flipping of perpective fits with what I posted yesterday about Peter Bihr’s approach to smart cities. It also fits with my main irritation at the state of debate about self driving cars, where all is centered on the car itself. Self driving cars will need to tap into a myriad of sensor streams from lamp posts, road pavement, and whatnot.
Cory’s approach provides agency, the standard smart city approaches tend to take it away.
the idea of an Internet of Things that treats people “as sensors, not things to be sensed” — a world where your devices never share your data with anyone else to get recommendations or advice, but rather, where all the inanimate objects stream data about how busy they are and whether they’re in good repair, and your device taps into those streams and makes private recommendations, without relaying anything about you or your choices to anyone else.
As I’ve often written, the most important thing about technology isn’t what it does, but who it does it to, and who it does it for. The sizzle-reels for “smart cities” always feature a control room where wise technocrats monitor the city and everyone in it — all I’m asking is that we all get a seat in that control room.
on Craphound.com
@tonAh yes, this featured on HN too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22084091
The case for cities where you’re a sensor, not a thing to be sensed | Hacker News
@ton That’s how GPS works. And there is in principle no reason why we couldn’t put identifiers into infrastructure.But. A large part of the world isn’t next to infrastructure. It’s not all city. So there are some logistical issues.
Of course. However the above is specifically aimed at city environments, which covers over half of the global population. Plus there’s plenty more built up environment that isn’t urban per se, where the same would hold.