Smart cities, data and right to privacy: a look from the Portuguese and Brazilian experience

Abstract

With the advent of the New Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) and the accelerated development of the urban centres, a new debate arises on how to use ICTs to enhance the development of cities and to make them smarter, in the way that theory has been pointing out as smart and human cities. In this sense, cities became big urban centres collecting data and the new possibilities arising out of it, such as the Big Data and other innovations such as the Internet of the Things (IOT) changed the scenario in terms of personal data. Thus being, this paper was oriented by this research question: how do public administrations deal with the treatment of personal data? For answering this question it was developed a framework whose primordial aim was to evaluate to what extent the Smart Cities projects adopt measures to ensure that the citizen has control on the data collected by the Administration (Digital Sovereignty). For the elaboration of this study it was used the method of monographic procedure, making essentially use of the research technique based on relevant literature review on Smart Cities, Governance and Data Protection. To the employment of these techniques it was added the case study, confronting theory with the practice undertaken by Operations Centre of Rio de Janeiro (OCR) and Integrated Management Centre of Porto (IMCP) concerning the governance of collected user's personal data. The preliminary results arising out of the application of an inquiry revealed that both OCR and IMCP do not present clear information on the treatment of the user's data neither in government portals nor as feedback, since they did not reply to the sent form. From this it may be inferred that the proposed maturity model appears as a valuable auxiliary tool for managers in the development of public policies for smart cities with a focus on data protection. Besides that it is also useful to fulfil academic gaps and, mainly, for the legal / normative production on the subject.