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Content type: Case Study
The Ugandan government has a running contract with the Chinese tech giant, Huawei, to supply and install CCTV cameras along major highways within the capital, Kampala, and other cities.
While details of the contract remain concealed from the public, the Uganda Police Force (UPF) released a statement, simply confirming its existing business partnership for telecommunication and surveillance hardware, and software between the security force and Huawei. However, it is not clear whether the…
Content type: Case Study
Well into the 21st century, Serbia still does not have a strong privacy culture, which has been left in the shadows of past regimes and widespread surveillance. Even today, direct police and security agencies’ access to communications metadata stored by mobile and internet operators makes mass surveillance possible.
However, a new threat to human rights and freedoms in Serbia has emerged. In early 2019, the Minister of Interior and the Police Director announced that Belgrade will receive “a…
Content type: Examples
Aided by its small size, Singapore's contact tracing efforts were a key element of controlling the virus's spread; detectives used CCTV footage to locate the contacts of more than 6,000 people. Singapore also contacts individuals required to self-isolate several times a day and requires them to send photographic proof of their location. Breaking quarantine attracts substantial penalties, including jail terms, and in one case stripped an offender of his residency rights. Singapore also quickly…
Content type: Examples
The "safety guidance texts" sent by health authorities and district offices in South Korea are causing information overload and have included embarrassing revelations about infected people's private lives. A text may include, for example, a link to trace the movements of people who have recently been diagnosed with the virus. Clicking on the link takes the user to the website of a district office that lists the places the patient had visited before testing positive. In one case, a man in his…
Content type: Examples
As part of its Smart Nation programme, in 2016 Singapore launched the most extensive collection of data on everyday living ever attempted in a city. The programme involved deploying myriad sensors and cameras across the city-state to comprehensively monitor people, places, and things, including all locally registered vehicles. The platform into which all this data will be fed, Virtual Singapore, will give the government the ability to watch the country's functioning in real time. The government…
Content type: Examples
In 2015, the Royal Parks conducted a covert study of visitors to London's Hyde Park using anonymised mobile phone signals provided by the network operator EE to analyse footfall. During the study, which was conducted via government-funded Future Cities Catapult, the Royal Parks also had access to aggregated age and gender data, creating a detailed picture of how different people used the park over the period of about a year. The study also showed the percentage of EE subscribers who visited…
Content type: Examples
In early 2016 Libreville, the capital of Gabon, signed up for Microsoft's CityNext programme, which is intended to supply innovative "smart city" solutions in eight key areas: health, social services, infrastructure, water, electricity, justice, culture, and education. Applications in each area will allow the city to manage traffic and urban transport, govern and collect taxes, and provide citizens with electronic access to health, citizen, police, and emergency services, as well as make it…
Content type: Examples
In 2016, researchers at Dalhousie University in Canada and the Weizman Institute of Science in Israel developed a proof-of-concept attack that allowed them to take control of LED light bulbs from a distance of up to 400 metres by exploiting a flaw in the Zigbee protocol implementation used in the Philips Hue system. Because the same key was used in every bulb, once it had been extracted from one bulb it could be reused on all of them. Writing a new operating system to one of the bulbs…
Content type: Examples
In 2014, NYC Planning Labs Chris Whong was sent and made public a complete a complete dump of historical trip and fare logs from New York City taxis in response to a Freedom of Information request. The more than 20GB of uncompressed data comprising more than 173 million individual trips included pickup and drop-off locations and times and other metadata - but also personally identifiable information about the driver. Careful analysis enabled researchers to deanonymise the entire dataset,…
Content type: Examples
In 2014, India's newly elected prime minister, Narendra Modi, allocated INR70.6 billion (upwards of £750 million) to a plan called "100 Smart Cities". Although a year later the funding dropped to INR1.4 billion, smart city-themed conference continued to take place in Delhi and Mumbai, and urban development minister Venkaiah Naidu expected imminent roll-out of cities with infrastructure comparable to any developed European city. However, the earliest of these cities - such as Palava City, built…