Smart city, province, or country

Smart city with 5G and Internet networks

There are companies, which have been advertising smart cities with all information linked and displayed. I don’t think that is a good idea.

There could be an umbrella with all information databases from all public departments linked, e.g. city data, provincial data, federal data, public transportation, income tax agency, citizenship department, etc. With all information linked and analyzed, staff could have an overview of a city, province, or country quickly and accurately.

Could government ask private sectors for user data? I don’t think this is a good idea to ask private sectors such as private company, publicly traded company, wireless network operators, ISP, etc. to provide data or open databases. There is an issue of privacy, confidential information, trade secrets, etc. that governments should not get involve in case of leaking.

The packet analyzer team is different as they must monitor Internet, phone communications, etc. to provide secure and safety to everyone. They could ask wireless operators and ISP for secured links to a R/O mirrored database for that purpose. They could also link to some less sensitive government database such as public transportation for more information. However they should not ask private companies or sensitive government’s databases access, because if data was leaking, they would be blamed for that.

In brief, smart cities to monitor and control everything in a city could be done with current technologies, but we should not do so due to privacy, trade secrets, confidentiality, and secured data by different parties involved.