In this article ‘A smart city should serve its users, not mine their data‘, Cory Doctorow verbalizes one of the important issues facing infrastructure digitalization.
The first aspect, following our post ‘How Data Really is the New Oil, and Better‘, is that whatever data a smart city gathers should not be left available for free to service suppliers. It belongs to the community and should be valued if it is to be made available.
Further than that, the risk of the smart city in terms of data management and privacy is that the system decides how to change the city instead of the citizens.
“What if people were the things that smart cities were designed to serve, rather than the data that smart cities lived to process?” Cory Doctorow goes on to suggest that the flow of data access should be reversed, the individual having the opportunity to tap into the collective data, not letting know of his final choice, rather than data being collected independently of his will.
This would be quite a different model from the one that develops currently where our data is reaped by giant organizations without our consent. The data should not be made free, both economically and in terms of availability. Quite an interesting avenue to investigate: the final equilibrium of the Collaborative Age will probably be somewhere in the middle.
