Washington Lawyer - November 2018 - 19

"

We are in a historically
unprecedented time
where technology-based
innovation is pervasive,
more consequential, and
moving faster than at any
time in history.

"

HARRIET PEARSON, Hogan Lovells

All agree that smart city applications present an opportunity to effect positive
and lasting change in cities. A June 2018 report, Smart Cities: Digital Solutions
for a More Livable Future, from the McKinsey Global Institute found that smart
city applications could reduce fatalities by 8 percent to 10 percent, accelerate
emergency response times by 20 percent to 35 percent, lessen the average
commute time for workers by 15 percent to 20 percent, and reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 10 percent to 15 percent.
The benefits are many. Take radio frequency identification (RFID) sensors in
roadways that can make asphalt or concrete pavement "smart" to the advantage of drivers. Radio-connected sensors can monitor pavement conditions
during blizzards, provide broadband services to passing vehicles and nearby
residences, and charge electric cars as they drive across them.
Even for the most routine tasks, smart city applications just make sense.
Sensors can monitor street trash can fill levels and then transmit that information to a cloud-based alert system. Once the bins are full, an electronic notice
is sent to trash collection trucks, which then develop a pickup route based on
what bins need to be serviced.
What has become especially appealing for local governments is the potential
of smart city technologies to improve the quality of life of residents while
also opening up new income-generating avenues through strategic public-
private partnerships.
"While good management is central to smart cities, municipal governments
cannot do everything themselves," notes the McKinsey Global Institute report.
"Companies and residents play an active role in shaping a city's performance.
Many smart city innovations are revenue-producing ventures from privatesector companies, and private actors could provide roughly 60 percent of the
initial investment required to deploy the full range of current tools."

SERVICE OR SURVEILLANCE?
The rub with all these smart city technologies is their ubiquity and reliance
upon a fragile and fragmented network of sensors, which could open up
vulnerabilities to hacking, flawed algorithms, and other technical glitches
that present legal and regulatory challenges.

"There are massive potential benefits from smart cities," says John Verdi,
vice president of policy of the Future of Privacy Forum. "There are genuine
privacy and data risks. It's incumbent upon government to first engage
communities and communicate effectively about these questions and
to respond to citizen concerns."
Legal experts say the most significant concerns center around the ownership,
processing, use, and security of data generated in the smart city ecosystem,
especially with the use of location-monitoring applications. Some of the data
could be quite personal.
"When things become interconnected on this scale, there are more opportunities for abuses," says Nelson. "Whenever you have the ability to make money
off of these kinds of technologies, it becomes actually more certain abuses
will happen."
The abuses that seem to capture the imagination the most are those around
location monitoring. It isn't against the law for government to watch people
on the street, but smart city tools could allow tracking that reveals any
number of things: trips to a psychologist, an illicit relationship, secret hobbies.
Take the ideas being advanced for new smart cards that would allow
individuals to pay for their Metro trips and the use of parking lots, bicycles
and scooters, and even ride-hailing vehicles. The cards would become a
data repository that could be shared with and exploited by the government
and its private partners fairly easily.
Questions about data ownership, storage, and control likely will grow even
more as cities seek to partner with private companies to deliver services.
Transit information generated by Metro smart cards may be clearly owned
by the government entity, but the status of any data that might come out
of that entity's partnership with owners of car-hailing companies like Uber
or Lyft, for example, would be uncertain.
Experts say public-private partnerships in smart city technologies may result
in conflicts between privacy and security rules that govern public versus
private sector actors differently. Regimes or regulations for governments are
likely to be dissimilar from those for private companies.

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NOVEMBER 2018

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WASHINGTON LAWYER 19
http://www.dcbar.org
Washington Lawyer - November 2018

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