Ethical and Data Privacy Issues
- IMPETUS Consortium
The smart systems and smart technologies increase the risk of unethical use of personal and sensitive information. Having that in mind, in order to enhance the smart cities’ resilience regarding security of public spaces, it is of utmost importance to identify and address ethical, legal and data privacy issues.
Ethical and data privacy issues are presented as follows:
We emphasize that the identified ethical and privacy issues are mainly focused on the smart cities' technological capabilities. Indeed, we consider the technological capacities of advanced AI algorithms to collect, transform, and share large amounts of data. The capacity to collect and handle ”Big Data” presents a moral dilemma when faced with the need to protect citizens’ privacy and personal data on one side of the spectrum (privacy in generalis) and protect citizens’ livelihood and property from the other (public security).
Therefore, a balance of the noted potentially conflicting interests should be established to simultaneously offer adequate and efficient mechanisms of preserving public security and personal privacy. Ethical issues arising out of the noted conflict of interests require constant study, vigilance, and practical considerations for all the involved stakeholders, but are not limited to the collection and processing of personal data.