Many modern cities strive to integrate information technology into every aspect of city life to create so-called smart cities. Smart cities rely on a large number of application areas and technologies to realize complex interactions between citizens, third parties, and city departments. This overwhelming complexity is one reason why holistic privacy protection only rarely enters the picture. A lack of privacy can result in discrimination and social sorting, creating a fundamentally unequal society. To prevent this Orwellian future, this project investigates privacy protections for the smart city.

This project address the problem of privacy risk in complex and interconnected smart city systems. With a growing number of cyber-physical systems, it becomes more and more challenging to keep track where sensitive data is collected, how it is transmitted, processed, stored and who has access to it. To alleviate this problem and improve privacy protection in smart cities, we aim to introduce a method that allows the creation, editing, exchange, and automatic analysis of privacy blueprints through a standardized modelling language.

This project is supported by the National Research Foundation Singapore (grant NRF2019-ITS005-0015, 2019-2021).