Audio Monitoring in Smart Cities - an Information Privacy Perspective

A contemporary trend is that more and more people are moving into cities, which causes the cities to grow at fast pace. This leads to a situation for the city where many challenges needs to be handled in order to develop a sustainable and attractive city for its citizens. For instance, housing, economy, culture, social and environmental conditions are challenges that needs to be grappled with for the cities. To meet these challenges, a concept of smart cities has started to develop around the world. A city that is smart needs to invest in, for instance, human capital, modern communication infrastructures and environmental solutions. One trend in smart cities is the endeavour to enhance citizens’ quality of life by investing in IT solutions. However, using different types of IT solutions can also make citizens’ more vulnerable towards privacy invasion. Previous studies have shown that people in general are increasingly anxious about their privacy. In this paper we will report on a study carried out regarding information privacy concerns related to an intelligent acoustic smart city solution for audio monitoring. This solution can, for instance, detect events such as sirens, recognise speech commands and detects presence in public buildings. Audio monitoring is a relatively new and under research phenomena. Hence, in this paper an analysis of a survey on information privacy concerns, carried out with 1000 respondents around Europe, is presented and discussed. The basic findings from this study indicate that people have information privacy concerns related to this type of solution on a general level. However, when being more thoroughly introduced to the solution and its usage area, the citizens also became more positive towards the solution. The study also identified principles that can support future designs of this type of systems.