The race to create the first truly smart city is on. Google has permission to transform a 190-acre plot of land in Toronto and Bill Gates is working on plans to construct a whole city in Belmont, Arizona.
The ultimate goal of a big tech smart city? To pack the places we live and work with sensors and connected devices that can make our lives slightly easier. Your bin can tell city authorities when it's full. Great. Traffic lights turn to green when there's no other cars around. Useful.
But, right now, smart cities don't really mean anything. They are a smorgasbord of technology buzzwords: 5G, big data and the Internet of Things. Every smart city development is focussed on incremental improvements to our lives but has one thing in common: a thirst for data.
And Amazon is winning this race. Amazon's Ring doorbells and security cameras have found their way into thousands of homes. (Amazon's ownership of Ring, which it purchased for $1 billion in 2018, isn't overtly publicised on its homepage and Google's suggested search results include the question 'Is Ring owned by Amazon?)
Ring's cameras have been hugely successful. Company founder and CEO Jamie Siminoff has claimed that during a 2015 trial with the Los Angeles Police Department, the cameras reduced burglaries in some neighbourhoods by "as much as 55 per cent". The company says its mission has "always been the same: to reduce crime in neighbourhoods". In 2018, it introduced a neighbourhood app that allowed groups of houses to receive notifications about local crimes and suggest when a Ring camera had seen "suspicious activity". (Ring says its Neighbourhood app has been "misrepresented in some reporting around it).
Ring has now partnered with more than 400 law enforcement agencies in the US. As a result, data can be shared between the two groups, raising concerns around the transparency of commercial agreements.
In the UK, there's a similarly murky picture. The Times has reported the Amazon-owned company has deals with police forces around the country. Ring has given at least four police forces doorbells to distribute to residents; five others have handed out "money-off vouchers or discount codes". Suffolk Constabulary has issued press releases promoting the use of Ring cameras in convictions.
The proliferation of Ring's cameras – other smaller companies exist in the market – highlight one of the creeping dangers of the nascent smart city: surveillance and data collection becoming normalised. (In 2016, The Intercept reported Ring had given its research and development team in Ukraine access to "every video created by every Ring camera around the world").
People become accustomed to being monitored as they move around their neighbourhoods and travel to work. The surveillance is even celebrated. After Halloween, the company bragged that its doorbells were used 15 million times on "busiest day of the year for Ring devices in the US". It also published videos of children, with blurred out faces, approaching people's homes when trick or treating. Ring says it only uses Halloween videos that have been publicly shared through its Neighbourhood app or those its customers have given it permission to reuse.
Still not convinced this is an issue? The surveillance bug has made it down to individual users. A quick visit to the Ring Doorbell Users Group on Facebook shows hundreds of videos. Some include people stealing objects from outside homes; others are of visitors, such as postal workers, approaching the cameras.
It's the opening salvo in a scrap that all the big technology companies want a part. Soon, buzzwords will vanish behind new products that collect and process data about everything we do – wherever we go. Who owns, and crucially processes, that data will become one of the defining issues in the battle for personal privacy versus technological expansion.
There's a lot to understand – and lawmakers have a real fight on their hands to ensure the creep of smart cities benefits the people who live in them, not just the corporate behemoths that are looking for new revenue streams.
This week on WIRED, we're diving deep into how technology is changing the cities around us. From how we design the buildings around us to the way that we travel through urban environments, we're looking at the ways we live today and in the not-so-distant future.
Updated November 18, 2019 12:01BST: This article has been updated with additional comment from Ring
Digital Society is a digital magazine exploring how technology is changing society. It's produced as a publishing partnership with Vontobel, but all content is editorially independent. Visit Vontobel Impact for more stories on how technology is shaping the future of society.
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This article was originally published by WIRED UK
