Imagine your smartphone knew everything about the city but the city didn’t know anything about you. Wouldn’t that be truly ‘smart’?
Immerse yourself in this idyllic article about how different smart cities could be if they served the people and not the corporations.
As is so often the case with technology, the most important consideration isn’t what the technology does: it’s who the technology does it to, and who it does it for.
Note of mine
What the author dismisses (probably due to ignorance) is if people can know how full the buses are (depending on the resolution of the data) a lot of information can still be extracted about individuals if not properly implemented.
Differential-privacy is an example on how you can release data in a safe manner (where it’s guaranteed that basically nothing can be revered back to info about indivuduals). But it’s quite hard to implement in practice.