Prof. dr. Liesbet van Zoonen, academic director of the Centre for BOLD Cities, recently published her article 'Privacy concerns in smart cities', which is scheduled for publication in Government Information Quarterly. The Centre for BOLD Cities has funded the open access availability of the article, which can be found here.
In the article, Van Zoonen, who was recently appointed member of the Academia Europaea (a European association of scientists who are among the global top in their respective fields), constructs a framework on privacy concerns in smart cities. In doing so, she hypothesises if and how smart city technologies and urban big data produce privacy concerns among the people in these cities.
The framework is built on the basis of two recurring dimensions in research about people's concerns about privacy: one dimension represents that people perceive particular data as more personal and sensitive than other types of data, the other dimension represents that people's privacy concerns differ according to the purpose for which data is collected
Van Zoonen argues that the general hypothesis of the framework offers clear directions for further empirical research and theory building about privacy concerns in smart cities, and that it provides a sensitising instrument for local governments to identify the absence, presence, or emergence of privacy concerns among their citizens. As such, the article may help direct questions addressed to and/or by the Centre for BOLD Cities.