Privacy Behavior in Smart Cities

Abstract

In this article, the authors present exploratory research about privacy behaviour in a smart city. They ask if and why people share personal data in a smart city environment. They designed a gamified survey that offers realistic scenarios in which people are asked to identify smart technologies and to share or withhold their personal data. The findings show that most respondents are willing to share their data for surveillance purposes and security benefits. They found that privacy behaviour was directly and most strongly explained by privacy concerns: people with more concerns shared less personal data than others. Smart city literacy had a much smaller effect on privacy behaviour, as did age, education, and income. They found no effect of gender or place of residence on any of the dependent variables. They discuss the meanings of these outcomes for local governments as a matter of digital placemaking (i.e., designing the smart city in a way that makes technology visible and provides transparency with respect to privacy and data governance).