Protecting Privacy in the Smart City: Novel Approaches for Urban Informatics and Geospatial Data Management

Abstract

Smart cities utilize urban informatics and geospatial data to enable intelligent services and optimized operations. However, pervasive sensing and data collection raise serious privacy concerns around surveillance, profiling, and unauthorized data exploitation. While regulations provide baseline protections, technical solutions are essential to enforce privacy in system design and usage. This paper surveys emerging privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs) tailored for smart city applications, including anonymization, federated analytics, encryption, differential privacy, decentralized identity, location privacy, and private data mining techniques. We also examine organizational privacy management strategies like assessments, transparency, auditing and oversight to build robust data governance. Future directions are discussed such as usable controls, algorithm auditing, edge privacy, geospatial intelligence policies, blockchain confidentiality, and instilling an ethical privacy culture across stakeholders. Adopting privacy by design principles using layered technical, governance and community mechanisms can help cities balance goals of innovation and sustainability with resident trust and digital rights.