From traffic congestion reduction to utility consumption improvement, care services optimization, new environmental and circular economy perspective, smart cities promise to enhance our lives in almost any aspects. Who hasn’t dreamt of such a utopia?

For every improvement in the city, though, there are significant risks for privacy that if neglected could lead to very damaging results for us all, if not the ultimate rise of surveillance capitalism, turning utopian intentions into dystopian catastrophe. In this context, solving the underlying privacy issue has become a must-have priority for anyone involved in smart city developments.

Myth: Thinking that digital innovation can only be achieved at the expense of privacy. 

Should we really make a choice between boosting smart-city initiatives vs privacy?

This has been the question in numerous discussions around smart cities concepts and projects.

It is indisputable that access to vast amounts of personal data is needed to make our cities smarter and enable digital enhancements. Yet in light of recent events that casted a harsh light on the notion of personal data collection and privacy respect, it would seem that the only way to ensure no harmful, unauthorized use of the data is to not share data at all.

So what trade-off should we make?

• should we enable city improvements at the cost of privacy? 
• Or should we protect privacy at the cost of general welfare and accountability? 

The common mistake here consists of thinking that digital innovation can only be achieved at the expense of privacy. 

There is this unwavering myth that privacy is the price to pay for better, personalized services, security or mobility in the city. Protecting data and privacy rights, however, should not be up for a trade-off in any future smart city.

So what if there was a better option? The release of Open Pryv.io shows that there is a way to encourage personal data collection being done right.

Reality: “Privacy doesn’t have to be only secrecy. We envision a world where privacy is the ability to share your data with awareness and control.” – Evelina Georgieva @ Pryv SA

Ultimately, locking all access to the data is not a sustainable solution if we are aiming for a brighter, technology-enhanced future. Benefiting from data-fueled solutions would not only help improve the city at many levels, but also provide us with new opportunities for self-development, bringing awareness to our patterns and unsustainable behaviors.

Finding “luxury in self-reproach”.

At some degree, smart cities could promote accountability and we might even find that there is some “luxury in self-reproach”.

Imagine a world where users would be able to step up and face the reality of their behaviours and impact on the planet, and where providers would offer the users real control over their data, including the ability to verify that it is used rightly, as well as real choice and transparency as to who and what services can access their data at a granular level.

It’s up to us to make this world the reflection of our reality.

So where to start to make it happen?

The real deal: Consensual Privacy-Preserving Data Collection and Management

Relying on privacy-preserving technologies might just be the perfect option to start your project on solid rock foundations. There have already been a number of existing solutions that will greatly help you not only save time and resources, but develop smart cities applications rightly.

We do have something for you as well: a ready-to-use, privacy-focused back-end solution to enable embedding such technologies to your project while addressing all personal data lifecycle management aspects, including consent management, interoperability and scalability. 

Pryv.io middleware is a development tool for developers which is solving challenges in personal and Real-World data collection, structuring, aggregation, processing, sharing and storage (from any data source: biometric, IoT, sensors, geolocation, weather forecasts, etc.) for different applications:

• Urban development, mobility, driver’s behaviour, traffic management
(GPS location & acceleration of vehicles)
• Smart utility consumption: sustainable energy and water household use and saving
(metrics from electrical and water counters and sustainable resources usage)
• Smart Housing
• Smart hospital and healthcare services
• Citizen behaviour analysis
 (phone location and aggregation of data from public transportations, shopping behaviour)


Based on a privacy-by-design, user-centric approach, Pryv’s technology allows development teams to build and manage smart digital data infrastructures and applications, delivering data transparency and auditability, multi-level data sharing and processing, within the respected data protection layers which apply within each and over multiple cross-industry and specific user/citizen groups requirements.

Among Pryv’s features:

• Personal Data Lifecycle management
• Data pooling 
• High-data IoT data input- ingestion
• Data Residency
• Webhooks
• Consent Management

Are you working on a smart city project?

Processing personal data?

Analyzing consumers behaviors?

10 facts developers should know when developing personal data collecting apps

Check out our code available in Open Source and book a meeting to know how Pryv can help you shape the cities of the future in full respect of privacy and cross-industry regulations.

Yours,

Stephanie & Evelina

Sources:

https://www.eco-business.com/news/smart-cities-of-the-future-eco-utopia-or-dystopian-nightmare/

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/12/smart-cities-help-residents-privacy-concerns

https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2019/jun/06/toronto-smart-city-google-project-privacy-concerns

https://blog.openmined.org/society-runs-on-information-flows/

The post Building Privacy-Preserving Smart Cities: Myth or Reality? appeared first on Pryv.

Lausanne, Switzerland – October 6^th, 2020

Two leading Swiss providers of privacy and security solutions, Pryv and CYSEC, announce a strategic collaboration focused on integrating their products: the personal data & consent management middleware Pryv.io and the confidential computing solution ARCA from CYSEC. The two Swiss trust-tech companies are jointly pursuing strategic opportunities as part of their growth strategies.

Businesses operating in highly regulated markets such as healthcare, insurtech, mobility and fintech collect, use, and store sensitive personal data at scale. They must therefore adopt the highest privacy and security standards to ensure that data remains protected throughout the full lifecycle and across all three states of data: data at rest, in transit and in use. The need for secure data management has spawned a new era of data protection and privacy regulation and practices including: GDPR; Swiss DPA; CCPA, PIPEDA. And more stringent regulation will follow.

Organizations face regulatory constraints at many stages of software design and must make decisions on how best to manage access control rights, provide data auditing capabilities and store / host data.  As more organisations and entire industries embrace the collection of personal data and its processing, they too will become subject to highly stringent regulations.

While the collection and use of personal data has become increasingly mainstream, only few organisations have invested in reliable data management and storage solutions that provide the necessary security and privacy. Most organisations remain without protection. The risk is not only a potential fine of 20M EUR or more, but also losing the trust of users. Once lost, user trust and an organisations reputation are very hard to regain. To avoid this, it is imperative to work with the right privacy and security tools.

The Pryv.io Personal Data & Privacy Management Software allows businesses to build digital solutions that can collect, store, share and rightfully use personal data. It comes with must-have consent and auditing tools to keep the clients compliant with existing and forthcoming regulations.

The ARCA solution leverages certified hardware to secure data in use, enabling sensitive data to be processed inside a trusted execution environment. In this way, data can be processed without exposing it to the rest of the system, reducing exposure of sensitive data and providing greater control and transparency for users. Its main advantage is the ease of integration as it is compatible with modern virtualization tools that software developers use, including Docker, Kubernetes, VMWare. The solution can be deployed in centralized, decentralized and distributed architectures.

Pierre-Mikael Legris, CEO at Pryv SA said: “By combining ARCA and Pryv.io, companies will blend best of breed security and privacy- by-design technologies for their backend and enhance trust for their customers.”

Florian Wiedmann, Secure Analytics Manager at CYSEC commented: “Organisations looking to comply with increasingly stringent data regulation require a one-stop solution for all their data security and management needs. Teaming up with Pryv will allow us to achieve this goal: A solution that offers both security and critical data management tools to allow organisations to achieve compliance easily.”

Trust is critical for companies that manage personal data. Combining ARCA’s security and Pryv.io’s privacy by design technology provide a robust, secure and consent-based backend to achieve trust. The integration of Pryv.io and ARCA provides businesses with an easy to deploy solution to collect, structure, share, use and store personal and sensitive data without compromising on security and compliance. ARCA and Pryv.io are further integrated with TAK by Build38.

About Pryv

Pryv makes essential software for data-driven healthcare innovation. Our purpose-built middleware helps organizations manage personal data from creation to use, sharing and disposal. We accelerate time to market, cut IT development costs and speed up connectivity to all data sources. Pryv addresses the enhanced citizen’s right under GDPR and turns privacy compliance into a competitive advantage. For more information, please visit pryv.gihub.io/www

About CYSEC

CYSEC SA is a cybersecurity company based at the EPFL Innovation Park in Lausanne, Switzerland, whose mission is to shorten the time-to-market of innovative services by facilitating their integration into a secured IT environment. To achieve its mission, CYSEC developed a general-purpose security platform called ARCA able to store data and execute applications in a Trusted Environment. By lowering down the barriers to protect data and software, CYSEC enables its customers to benefit from a whole new level of flexibility and agility which is a game-changer today considering the fast-pace at which security and business requirements evolve. CYSEC focuses on the provision of its cybersecurity solutions in four vertical sectors, namely financial services, IoT, space and telecoms. For more information, please visit www.cysec.systems

  Media Contacts

CYSEC SA

Florian Wiedmann

Secure Analytics Manager

florian.wiedmann@cysec.systems

Pryv SA

Evelina Georgieva

CBDO & Co-founder

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