Smart Cities Offer Promises and Concerns Over Privacy

The smart city vision includes driverless cars, renewable energy to aid a city's power consumption, energy-efficient buildings, and communications systems that work with the location's infrastructure to avoid waste, among other features.

Google is creating a smart city in Toronto, and, with the vast resources of the technology giant, the first widespread implementation of the promises of smart cities may be at hand.

There are still concerns over certain aspects of implementing the smart cities program.

One analyst agreed that the promise of smart cities may be oversold.

"Cities have always been home to our greatest aspirations and visions of utopia. The 1939 World's Fair/urban renewal/post-war cities promised a utopian city of tomorrow with no blight and smooth traffic. Instead, we got suburbs, too many cars, traffic, white flight and lack of sustainability. The modern urban movement of the 1990s promised a creative class and revived urban centers built on the principle that denser cities were smarter and open innovation worked better than suburban office parks."

Privacy might be a thing of the past in a world of smart cities.

As with Toronto's concerns, how to safeguard privacy and data collected in a smart city is a major question that still needs to be answered.

"From a cybersecurity perspective, AI technology is in the hands of both the good guys and the bad guys. Companies are continuously collecting data about us from our cell phones, smart speakers, ubiquitous cameras, etc. and using AI to learn about our habits, objectives, and intentions through machine learning. While we should not be paranoid about big brother, we need public officials to demand transparency and accountability from technology companies that are trying to profit from personal data that is collected via smart city initiatives."

In the end, the hype around smart cities might just be a marketing ploy for big corporations to sell their devices and gadgets.

Thus, smart cities apparently are at a crossroads between promise and the fulfillment of those promises.