Challenges and Design Goals for an Architecture of a Privacy-preserving Smart City Lab

Abstract

In the domain of so-called smart cities, ICT technologies play a vital role to improve life quality and resource efficiency in future cities. Many smart city applications depend on sensor data – live data for real-time reaction or stored data for analysis and optimization – to measure city-wide processes like mobility, energy consumption and energy production, or environmental factors like city climate or air quality. To realize such future smart city applications, we face many challenges, including data integration from heterogeneous sensor systems, poor or unknown sensor data quality, effective and efficient management of big sensor data volumes, as well as support the development of mobile and/or analytical applications that use that data. The Bamberg Smart City Lab will provide an Open Data testbed for research and evaluation of sensor-based applications in smart cities. In this paper, we focus particularly on the challenge of privacy: how can we set up long-running city-wide sensor campaigns and share the data without compromising the citizen’s privacy? A fundamental aspect in our current approach is to understand and incorporate the Privacy by Design (PbD) guidelines. We apply them to our specific requirements and develop a privacy-preserving architecture. To do this we evaluate and incorporate the integration of different state-of-the art privacy methods to reduce the risk of leaks to a minimum, especially in the field of online publication of data sets.