Interview by Margo Anderson: “For years, Gwen Shaffer has been leading Long Beach, Calif. residents on “data walks,” pointing out public Wi-Fi routers, security cameras, smart water meters, and parking kiosks. The goal, according to the professor of journalism and public relations at California State University, Long Beach, was to learn how residents felt about the ways in which their city collected data on them.
She also identified a critical gap in smart city design today: While cities may disclose how they collect data, they rarely offer ways to opt out. Shaffer spoke with IEEE Spectrum about the experience of leading data walks, and about her research team’s efforts to give citizens more control over the data collected by public technologies…Residents want agency. So that’s what led my research team to connect with privacy engineers at Carnegie Mellon University, in Pittsburgh. Norman Sadeh and his team had developed what they called the IoT Assistant. So I told them about our project, and proposed adapting their app for city-deployed technologies. Our plan is to give residents the opportunity to exercise their rights under the California Consumer Privacy Act with this app. So they could say, “Passport Parking app, delete all the data you’ve already collected on me. And don’t collect any more in the future.”..(More)”
