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JayTongkakSecondEssay 3 - 10 Feb 2020 - Main.EbenMoglen
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< | It is strongly recommended that you include your outline in the body of your essay by using the outline as section titles. The headings below are there to remind you how section and subsection titles are formatted. | | | Is the idea of smart cities actually smart? | | | As much as I would like to see the idea of automatic cities being implemented, as each city is moving gradually toward the idea of big city by introducing new surveillance gadgets and methods, I think we should first establish the ground rules to prevent the history from repeating itself. Enforcement related to privacy under the US regime is mainly under the Federal Trade Commission, which focuses on the consumer protection aspects of the privacy. The US could consider implementing a new federal commission or an independent private data regulator to be in charge of smart cities specifically to regulate and enforce how our data will be managed by each operator, to what extent our data can be collected or used, opt-out options for those who want to live in a city without being exposed to public, so on and so forth. Otherwise, I do not think we are ready to move toward being a smart city just yet.
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Smart Cities is an IBM product, long already in existence. Huawei sells a layer called "Safe Cities," which adds facial recognition surveillance into all the other big-data operations elements. So you can buy IBM Smart Cities solutions for transport, waste management, encironmental maintenance, etc., and add a side-order of despotism from Huawei all in a highly-integrated package. If you are Barcelona, or Sao Paulo, that's not the future, that's now.
Sidewalk Labs is Alphabet's effort to turn that concept into one built
and run by the data-miner, for but not under the ultimate control of
the public. If the point was to write the essay about Sidewalk Labs, then the route to improvement is a more careful consideration of the precise political economy involved: the subsidization of public services through data-mining concessions, turning public services in the built environment into "free" cubes on cheese on the data-miners' mousetraps.
If the point is privacy, Chinese Communist Party automated despotism is the actual illustration at the center, not at the edge.
In either event, the conclusion, with its invocation of new agencies, needs to be improved by some specificity. Obviously new administrative structures presume new legislation. Knowing what laws to write would have to emerge from a clear definition of the problem and some overall architecture of solution within which an agency can be empowered to fill up the policy blanks over time. To be better, the essay needs both to establish that problem definition and suggest the largest contours of the appropriate response.
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