A Step Towards Dystopia? How the COVID-19 Pandemics Exacerbated the Data Protection Challenges Raised by Smart Cities

The need to respond to COVID-19 pandemics brought to the spotlight the multiple possibilities that the use of technology – and (big) data – in smart cities offer to address disasters and emergencies. All over the world, local governments – more or less successfully – partnered with private companies and deployed new and old technologies (e.g. drones, heath sensors, CCTV cameras, (contact tracing) apps) to make sure that the population complied with government advice to limit the spread of the virus. Nevertheless, the response to COVID-19 pandemics also demonstrated how the data protection challenges arising from smart cities are far from being just theoretical. Certain smart cities initiatives concretised dystopian scenarios, proving that, unless controls are in place, the detrimental effects deriving from the large-scale deployment of smart city technologies can easily become tangible.
The objective of this paper is to pinpoint how the data protection challenges already existing in smart cities have been exacerbated by the need to respond to the COVID-19 pandemics and to propose solutions to minimise the negative impacts of technologies on fundamental rights and promote citizens empowerment. The structure of the paper is the following. In the first section, to give the reader some background information, the concept of the smart city will be introduced. Then, an overview of the challenges arising from smart cities, both data protection-related and beyond, will be provided. After describing some of the smart city initiatives adopted all over the world, the paper will illustrate how the COVID-19 pandemics exacerbated the challenges identified in the previous sections. Finally, solutions to minimise the negative impacts of technologies on fundamental rights and promote citizens’ empowerment will be proposed.