Monday 18th January 2016, Singapore ITU SG-20
Joseph A. Cannataci
Co-ordinating Person for PUPIE, CONSENT, SMART, RESPECT, MAPPING, CARISMAND projects
Chair in European Information Policy & Technology Law
Co-Founder STeP – Security, Technology & e-Privacy Research Group
Faculty of Law, University of Groningen, The Netherlands
Head of Department of Information Policy and Governance
Faculty of Media and Knowledge Sciences
University of Malta
Professor (adjunct) Security Research Institute
School of Computer and Security Sciences
Edith Cowan University, Australia
Professor Joe Cannataci
UN Special Rapporteur on Privacy
University of Groningen / University of Malta
srprivacy@ohchr.org
j.a.cannataci@rug.nl /
j.cannataci@sec.research.um.edu.mt
“As every man goes through life he
fills in a number of forms for the
record, each containing a number of
questions…There are thus hundreds
of little threads radiating from every
man, millions of threads in all. If
these threads were suddenly to
become visible, the whole sky would
look like a spider’s web, and if they
materialized like rubber bands,
buses and trams and even people
would lose the ability to move and
the wind would be unable to carry
torn-up newspapers or autumn
leaves along the streets of the city.”
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Smart cities make Solzhenitsyn’s
concerns look miniscule
 It is no longer (only) the forms that we fill
 It is the electronic tracks that we leave everywhere...
 …and of which most of us are often never conscious
A problem with the English language
Why English must catch up with French
SURVEILLABLE, adjectif
Définition de surveillable
adjectif singulier invariant en genre
1.Qui peut être surveillé.
I can’t find a neat equivalent for surveillable in English or any English dictionary
Let’s all start using the word surveillable (Oxford/Fowler Dictionary please note) because
Smart Cities may accelerate our transition from served to surveillable to surveilled
We are already super-surveillable on-line
Smart cities complete the eco-system of surveillable envrionments for us to live in
Book eight years ago (2008)
Stats four years ago (2012)
Are smart cities worth the risk?
Privacy, autonomy and freedom
“in a society where modern information technology is
developing fast, many others may be able to find out how
we act. And that, in turn, may reduce our freedom to act as
we please – because once others discover how we act, they
may think that it is in their interest, or in the interest of
society, or even in our own interest to dissuade us,
discourage us, or even stopping us from doing what we
want to do, and seek to manipulate us to do what they
want to do”
(Paul Sieghart 1983)
Privacy and autonomy: a formula
“Shorn of the cloak of privacy that protects him, an
individual becomes transparent and therefore manipulable.
A manipulable individual is at the mercy of those who
control the information held about him, and his freedom,
which is often relative at best, shrinks in direct proportion to
the extent of the nature of the options and alternatives
which are left open to him by those who control the
information”
(Cannataci - 1986)
Quality of life – defined by some values
 The right to free development of personality
 Autonomy as a value
 Self-determination as part of the conceptual framework




of autonomy
The right to self –determination – as a value emanating
from the value of autonomy
The right to political self-determination
The right to informational self-determination
Informational self-determination as a design criteria for
smart cities
It is stupid to lose quality of life
It’s the
SMART CITY
STUPID
Are we being stupid about smart cities?
 What do others understand by the term smart city?
 Try googling “ images for smart city”
 The results help you understand the many features that
are being considered to be benefits from smart cities
 …but are they all benefits?
 Are these supposed benefits a double-edged sword?
 Will the aggregation of all data in a smart city lead to an
unacceptable deterioration of our quality of life?
Smart everything (except us?)
Before going on to smart city solutions
Let’s reflect a bit about privacy, smart
cities and re-writing the social contract
Have the last ten years of the Internet
already changed the social contract?
 Technology development is key
 Private Corporations took advantage of technology
development…but put the fine print of their business model
into very fine print indeed
 Governments have also taken advantage of technology
development…and they have not been telling their citizens
about how they are using it to snoop upon them
 Until recently there was no structured discussion about the
way corporations and governments have been changing the
social contract without formal or informal consultations
No Privacy – By Design?
 Preventing Smart Cities from becoming the
antithesis of privacy by design
 Re-writing the new social contract – one where
values can be properly protected
 Who will provide a lead? ITU should be part of
the solution, and should take a joint lead
 In the world of big data how can the medio stat
virtus be found in smart cities?
The path to stupidly-surveillable
 The arrival of the computer has made us much more
surveillable
 Mobile devices and our being always on-line have led to
us being super-surveillable
 Smart cities will make us super-sempre-surveillable
 Smart cities will generate so much data that no human
can ever analyse so much quantity so, by definition, for a
smart city to be worth-while, to be viable, most
processing must be automated including the automated
profiling of individuals. By definition, unless properly
designed, a smart city will make us stupidly-surveillable
Conclusion: 5 ideas to prevent the
transition from surveillable to surveilled
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
Develop safeguards to prevent everybody becoming surveilled,
often by gving us the option to be less surveillable;
Develop and adopt disincentives for automated profiling
Fund and increase proper, adequate resourcing for research i.e.
for understanding the possible and undesired - hitherto
sometimes unforeseeable and unforeseen – of smart cities in
the era of open data and big data
Integrate Privacy as a value as part of the value system of the
right to free development of personality and the right to
informational self-determination in smart city design
Design-guidelines to develop privacy-friendlier smart cities
Two ways of defining information policy
“a question of encouraging the right information flows and discouraging the
wrong ones”
(Paul Sieghart 1983)
“Like any other policy, Information Policy deals with principles or rules that
guide decisions in order to achieve a rational outcome. Two factors distinguish
Information Policy from other areas. Firstly, its subject focus i.e., the flows of
information and the constant tension that exists between information flows
which have grown organically and those which were born, intentionally or
intentionally out of deliberate policy decisions. Secondly, that it involves a
variety of actors as it relates to the information-related behaviour and
decisions made by any one or a combination of an individual (e.g. a natural
person exercising informational self-determination), a private collective (not
enjoying a legal persona), a for-profit or not-for-profit corporation (enjoying a
legal persona), other non-state actors and finally, state actors and sub-sets
thereof. “
(Cannataci 2015)
From an information policy point of view
 The internet grew inorganically and has
made us infinitely more surveillable – we
are now considering whether society
should intervene through a properlythought out information policy for a
society which is always on-line
 Smart cities risk growing inorganically and
risk making us stupidly surveillable –
 ITU S-SG20 is part of the structured
discussion as to where, when and how
(rather than if) we should intervene
through relevant, evidence-based
information policy
 I wish you well
Thank you for your attention
E-Mail: srprivacy@ohchr.org j.a.cannataci@rug.nl
jcannataci@sec.research.um.edu.mt
Web:
http://www.ohchr.org/EN/Issues/Privacy/SR/Pages/SRPrivacyIndex.aspx
www.um.edu.mt/maks/ipg/lexconverge
www.smartsurveillance.eu www.respectproject.eu