The case for cities where you’re a sensor, not a thing to be sensed
> It’s not hard to see why: “smart” has become code for “terrible”. A “smart speaker” is a speaker that eavesdrops on you and leaks all your conversations to distant subcontractors for giant tech companies. “Smart watches” spy on your movements and sell them to data-brokers for ad-targeting. “Smart TVs” watch you as you watch them and sell your viewing habits to brokers.I guess that would make the Guardian a “smart website”.> The problem is that the smart city, as presently conceived, is a largely privatised affair designed as a public-private partnership to extract as much value as possible from its residentsI looked quite hard for any evidence in the article that this was the case other than ‘I don’t know, it feels kind of icky’ but couldn’t find any.> If you want to page a minibus – something like an Uber Pool, but run by the city, licensed, safe, paying a living wage and not mining your data – you can summon one, and yes, this exposes your identity so that the driver can find you.Ah, and there’s the nub of it. It’s fine for a responsible (read public-sector) technocrat to mine and process your data, but it’s evil when a company does it.