Surveillance Risks in IoT Applied to Smart Cities

With the advent of the IoT, proximity sensor devices are installed in many places in smart cities. Without any regulation or social policy, they could lead to a super-surveillance network managed by multi-agent systems in the future. Such networks may be able to reduce accidents, risks, damage and errors. However, they also pose high risk of surveillance and data breaches, including hacking attacks or malware intrusion. This research project is aimed at investigating the implications of IoT-driven surveillance in smart cities from privacy, data protection and ethical perspectives. The identification of the critical issues related to the extensive deployment of such sensing devices in the urban area will constitute a starting point for the development of a new regulatory framework for sensor-based surveillance in European Smart Cities. This new regulatory system shall be aimed at providing citizens with effective tools to exercise their rights to privacy and data protection when facing IoT-driven surveillance. Indeed, setting a clear set of rules governing big urban data processing shall be considered crucial to ensure a fair, democratic, human-centric development of smart cities in Europe.