Big Data for Urban Sustainability by Stephen Jia Wang & Patrick Moriarty

Author:Stephen Jia Wang & Patrick Moriarty
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer International Publishing, Cham

4.8 Discussion

Big data could ‘fundamentally change urban science’ [20]. But can these varied problems facing the application of big data for the common good in cities be overcome? Both government and private industry have every incentive to make big data work. The remaining technical problems will most likely be solved if the past stunning successes of information technology are any guide. Martínez-Ballesté et al. [35] were also optimistic that both the privacy and security problems of big data in the context of smart cities could be solved. But as they stressed, if privacy concerns are not properly addressed, urban residents might avoid using smart city services. With the trust and support of the urban public lost, the many possible benefits from their application will not be realised. The same is likely to be true for commercial applications of big data. A code of ethics for privacy protection is needed, one that realises that as use of big data increases, there is a need to go beyond traditional privacy concerns, with its focus on data collection, and shift the emphasis to privacy concerns that can arise with using the data in new ways. And for all his penetrating critique of smart cities and big data, Rob Kitchin [28] has still argued that we need them—but that the ethical problems discussed above must be addressed.

Presently many national governments, while prosecuting private hackers, are themselves secretly involved in at least preparing for similar activities, as in cyber warfare. Widespread breaches of security, whether from private individuals, criminal organisations or governments put not only the use of big data, but also use of the Internet, at risk. Governments must continue to prosecute individual or criminal hacking, but must also realise that cyber warfare will be to no country’s benefit. During the Cold War, both the US and the USSR realised that there could be no winners in an all-out nuclear war, and agreed to various forms of arms limitation. Something similar is needed for cyber warfare. If the potential security problems of big data are not solved, the use of big data for the urban common good will be severely restricted in its application. Bill Montgomery [37] has developed what he considered to be a solution to the security problem in an era of big data and the IoT. As he put it when describing this future world: ‘The only way that the potential of IoT was fully realized was through the introduction of an IoT application-delivery model that established each individual nation as its own “trust center,” while providing the ability for information to flow easily and securely from one trust center to another.’ No data would be exchanged with non-trusted nations. It is still open to doubt whether this approach would fully solve security problems.

There are forces pushing for the introduction of big data solutions to urban problems. These forces include the actions of vendors with smart city software packages to sell, as well as the undoubted success of big data for several types of scientific research, and in marketing and retail.

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