Adelaide to become Australia's first smart city but could lose out on privacy

Stepping into the elevator at the school for computer sciences hub at Adelaide University, Prof Ali Babar shakes his head in exasperation.

As the doors close the head of the Australian centre for smart cities mentions the woman recently found dead in China 30 days after technicians attempting to fix a glitch cut power to the lift she was in and left her stranded inside.

“That’s the kind of thing that wouldn’t happen in a smart city,” he says.

Babar has just finished another day coordinating with a coalition of government, business and academia about his mission to turn Adelaide into a trial site for such innovations that could one day be rolled out across the rest of Australia and around the world.

The goal is to identify ways in which emerging digital technologies can improve how a city functions, whether traffic congestion, reducing carbon emissions or – as in the case of the elevator in Xi’an – personal safety.

“Adelaide is small enough to use as a laboratory but large enough to undertake ambitious initiatives,” he says.

“A proof of concept can be developed and tested here.”

Central to the idea of a smart city is the internet of things – everyday objects that feature online connectivity, such as elevators that actively communicate data to technicians about malfunctions and the number of passengers on board.

Other prospective technologies being looked at in the realm of safety include biometric readers that allow paramedics to obtain the medical records of an incapacitated patient via a fingerprint scan, or video recognition techniques capable of identifying suspects of a crime even if they are wearing a mask.

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Initiated eight months ago, key players in the project include the University of Adelaide, the South Australian Department of State Development, Adelaide City council and companies including Ernst and Young, Cisco, Microsoft, Oracle, Fuji and Xerox.

Most recently, on 3 March, Babar secured a memorandum of understanding with tech giants NEC Australia.

“We will try to brainstorm suitable projects for Adelaide by partnering with [NEC Australia], sharing findings and making those findings available to the general public,” he says.

“That in turn will stimulate further collaboration with industry partners and government.”

NEC Australia’s South Australian state manager, Milan Djuricic, says NEC was involved in a similar initiative in Britain as part of the Bristol Is Open project, to which the company contributed software-defined networking (SDN) compatible switches, LTE small cells and iPasolink ultra-compact microwave systems.

“It was a similar arrangement to Adelaide in that a major university [Bristol University] was involved and there was a joint effort,” he says.

He says Adelaide was attractive for NEC because it offered a solid foundation of infrastructure to build upon, a receptive political environment, and particular challenges that Bristol did not present.

“We can take things further in Adelaide in relation to energy management and water management, given South Australia is the driest state in the driest country,” he says.

“NEC has leading global technologies in relation to water leakage detection which help identify failures before they fail.

“That means investment can be made in the right areas to prevent water leakage.”

NEC also has plenty to offer when it comes to public safety, with the company’s biometric identification technologies already being used on the smartphones of South Australian and Northern Territory police to enable immediate identification of members of the public.

The company says its biometrics – combined with access control and video monitoring systems – will ensure smart cities are able to rapidly respond to safety incidents when required.

Djuricic would like to allay privacy concerns that have arisen over these emerging technologies: “At the end of the day, smart city research is not about private data.”

Civil Liberties Australia’s vice president, Tim Vines, sees it differently.

“These smart technologies hold a lot of promise in terms of making better cities and using resources more efficiently,” he says.

“But they also bring challenges, especially in privacy, and there has to be a public discussion about data being gathered by private companies, city councils and police.

“If we can anonymously identify someone, what limitations will be placed?”

Vines says even ostensibly benign smart technology advances presented challenges, citing the Australian Centre for Smart Cities’ interest in technology that encourages people to dispose of rubbish in the correct type of bin as something that could lead to rubbish detection within smart bins.

He asks: “If technology could detect the type of rubbish, what if someone tried to dispose of an illicit substance, would it set off an alarm or message the police?”

David Lindsay, vice chair of the Australian Privacy foundation, says he is very concerned about the potential for widespread surveillance offered up by the internet of things.

“As with any new technologies and applications, we believe that adequate and appropriate privacy protection should be built into the design of the technologies,” he says.

“When new applications and technologies are being deployed, it is absolutely essential that a proper privacy impact assessment (PIA) be conducted by an independent body and by means of a public process.”

Babar concedes that smart city technologies present “severe privacy concerns” and society would need to come up with a mechanism to address them, and says the Australian centre for smart cities is investigating privacy awareness as part of its brief.

“For example we will be looking at who owns the data from the user’s point of view, and enabling users to manage their own privacy,” he says.

“Perhaps at certain times they are willing to share their data, but at other times of day they don’t want to and they need to be able to control that.”

He points out that passive data collection is hardly a new development, pointing to his smart phone.

“This phone has a number of sensors collecting data as it is, so all we’re looking at is how this sort of data should be used.”