Smart cities are the future, but they may threaten privacy

You may have heard the term “smart city” before-a futuristic, utopian idea, and we may see its implementation in the foreseeable future. In fact, some metropolises-such as Singapore, Seoul, Amsterdam, Oslo and Tokyo-are already on the road to “smartness”.

So, what makes a city smart? This label is still very abstract and may contain different meanings, but if you go the boring route and actually Google it, you will come across this unified definition: an interconnected urban area that uses various sensors and other methods to collect and Use data to improve its operations.

In other words, a smart city is a place where devices are connected to public infrastructure. Therefore, everything that happens within the infrastructure is analyzed in real time to achieve various goals, such as reducing costs and resource consumption, or increasing the connection between citizens and the government.

related: Talk about the digital future: smart cities

However, as you might have thought, connecting data and managing access to smart devices is a slippery slope. The mural that Bansky painted on the wall of the Royal Mail office in London in 2007 may best illustrate its danger. It depicts a child writing “a country under CCTV” while being watched by the police and a dog. The whole work is properly grouped together near a real CCTV camera.

Yes, public video surveillance may help the police collect evidence (and possibly prevent crime, although it has been inefficient) Being suspected), but its dystopian side-effects to society-such as the feeling of being constantly monitored and potential cases of CCTV abuse-are Astonishing.

This happens in a democratic society. Now, imagine the dangerous, unpredictable dark side of building smart city applications under an authoritarian regime.In fact, there is a good example: China’s infamous social credit system-a database that monitors the “credibility” of individuals-is essentially Repertoire You live 24 hours a day, assess your loyalty to the country, and decide whether you are good enough to enjoy a shorter waiting time in the hospital or give priority to admission and employment.

Smart city without intermediaries

After six years of research and development projects, we have been trying to use Interplanetary File System (IPFS), Ethereum, and Substrate to build secure Internet of Things (IoT) applications, and we have identified a part that can be changed to avoid most problems effect.

There is a single point of failure in the design of smart city infrastructure. When you try to access a service/device (such as renting a car through a car sharing app), your data will be transferred to an IT company, and after review, the IT company will decide whether to grant you access to its services. Although the company must assess the risks (if they are not necessary) before providing services to you, this process is unfair to the end user. Every time someone starts collecting data, it may continue to collect more data than needed, or use your sensitive data for additional profit (such as selling it to a data broker).

related: The data economy is a dystopian nightmare

Fortunately, blockchain technology allows us to combine all the economic and technical details of a given transaction into an “atomic” transaction that no middleman can read and abuse. It enables people to send messages directly to smart devices (vending machines, cars, lockers, or parking meters) while making payments and all the technical details of the services they purchased.

Now, imagine all these devices Interconnect via cross-chain messaging (XCMP) And they are completely synchronized with each other, analyzing your transactions for only one purpose: to provide better services. Most importantly, IoT devices that support Polkadot can share the security achieved through the relay chain (the core component of its network) and other complex mechanisms that are designed to prevent most attack vectors.

Does this sound exactly the same as the utopian smart city future we described above, minus all negative effects?

Running a smart city through the blockchain means that there are thousands of transactions every minute, which the crowded Ethereum network cannot handle-at least at this stage. On the other hand, Polkadot can protect multiple blockchains by enabling a set of universal validators and evenly distribute transactions among them, thereby providing economy and transaction scalability.

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