Eran will give a lecture on March 14th (Wednesday), at 10:30, at the School of Computing, National University Singapore (NUS). More details here. The seminar will describe two new studies into Smart City privacy: a large-scale survey of residents’ attitudes towards the smart city (with Michael Birnhack, Tali Hatuka, Issy Rosen-Tsvi, and Shahaf Donio), and algorithmic analysis of smart city privacy (with Yoni Birman). Here is the abstract.

Abstract. The concept of the Smart City is becoming central to the development of technologies that regulate and enhance urban spaces. At the same time, smart cities bring about new privacy challenges, as cities start to collect unprecedented volumes of data, with the direction of local or central governments, and have an increasing effect on people’s lives. In this talk, we will investigate the particular privacy challenges related to smart cities, understand the impact of privacy, and discuss possible solutions. First, the talk will describe the results of a survey (n=480) conducted in Tel Aviv, which analyzes the effect of privacy, neighborhoods, and computer literacy on adoption of smart city technologies. Furthermore, we will assess new privacy metrics that can be used to quantify and to analyze the particular characteristics of smart cities. I will describe new behavioral privacy measures and discuss how they can be used to capture essential properties of information exposure and inference. Empirical analysis of these measures, using actual smart-city data, shows how inference-oriented data aggregation can be used to obtain functional services with less harm to the residents’ privacy.