Personal data a commodity in futuristic city
Thousands of workers are building a city in northwest Saudi Arabia the kingdom says will be like no other.
IN the desert sands of Saudi Arabia’s deep northwest, thousands of workers are building a futuristic city that the kingdom says will be like no other.
Out of the ancient sands will emerge a hightech urban centre called The Line: zerocarbon with flying drones for taxis, holographs for teachers and even a manmade moon.
The smart city is housed within Neom, a $US500 billion
($NZ801 billion) business zone aimed at diversifying the economy of the world’s top oil exporter, and the brainchild of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. Neom is financed, in part, by the nation’s sovereign wealth fund, and is due to be completed by 2025.
While Neom would feature manufacturing and tourism zones, The Line would stack homes and offices vertically, and mine the data of its 9 million people, giving residents more say over their data and paying them for it — a world first, an official said.
‘‘Without trust, there is no data. Without data, there is no value,’’ Joseph Bradley, chief executive of Neom Tech & Digital Co, which will oversee the consent management platform, said.
‘‘This technology enables users to review and easily understand the intention behind the use of their personal data, while offering financial rewards for authorising the use of their data,’’ he said.
The Line is being designed with artificial intelligence at its core, with data used to manage power, water, waste, transport, healthcare and security, like many smart cities.
Data would also be collected from residents’ smartphones, their homes, facial recognition cameras and a host of other sensors, a data sweep Bradley said would feed information back to the city and help it predict user needs.
But the country’s poor human rights record did not bode well for responsible data usage or the safeguarding of individual privacy, digital rights experts said.
‘‘The surveillance concerns are justified,’’ social impacts of technology researcher Vincent Mosco said.
‘‘It is, in effect, a surveillance city.’’
The Saudi Ministry of Communications and Information Technology did not respond to a request for comment.
What price privacy?
An increased digitisation of all aspects of daily life has spawned worries about who owns personal data, how it is used, and what it is worth.
Some data rights experts, economists and lawmakers have proposed data dividends, or payments for data, which is often collected without an individual’s knowledge or informed consent.
But experts are divided over how much to pay, and if such incentives will create a twotier system where some people’s data is deemed more valuable than that of others, further entrenching inequalities created by the digital divide.
‘‘Tricking users into using a private consent platform does not replace a data protection regulation that protects people’s personal information,’’ Marwa Fatafta, regional policy manager at Access Now, a digital rights organisation, said.
‘‘It sounds like a privacy disaster waiting to happen. Adding money as an incentive is a terrible idea. It distorts the right of people to freely consent and normalises the practice of selling personal data for profit,’’ she said.
Saudi Arabia has introduced a personal data protection law, and Bradley said Neom officials were addressing privacy concerns.
What Neom proposed to do was just an ‘‘extreme continuation of what cities do today anyway’’, Jonathan Reichental, an adjunct professor at the University of San Francisco who researches smart cities and data governance, said.
‘‘We are a datadriven world. We are all consenting to data use every day and that data is leveraged by cities and organisations,’’ he said.
By getting paid for their data, Neom’s residents would have an advantage over those who did not, he said.
‘‘By not being part of that, you miss out on any financial gains,’’ he said.
Fahd Mohamed, a 28yearold engineer who lives in Jeddah, agreed, saying that if he lived in The Line, he would consent.
‘‘My data is already used by social media platforms, ridesharing apps, etc,’’ he said.
‘‘This system is better because
I get paid.’’
With the growing digitisation of public and privatesector services worldwide, come the promised benefits of better governance and more convenience — and increasing concerns about surveillance and privacy.
In 2020, Alphabet’s Sidewalk Labs shelved a plan for a datadriven neighbourhood in Toronto, while a resident in the Indian city of Hyderabad sued the state this year over facial recognition systems he said were an invasion of privacy.
Users on Neom’s consent management platform could decide what personal data to share, who had access to the data,
monitor how it was used, and could opt out any time, Bradley said.
The system would also alert users if data was used without consent, or if there was suspicious activity or a data breach.
By sharing their location, health and movement data, for example, if a user was immobile for too long, a drone could be deployed to check on them, Bradley said.
However, Faisal AlAli, a 33yearold Saudi marketing specialist in Dubai, was not convinced.
‘‘How can I trust that the data will only be shared for as long as I want, and only with the third parties or services that I have chosen?’’ he said.
‘‘How can I trust that it will not be used for other reasons? It is not 100% trustworthy.’’
Lack of interaction
Surveillance may not be the only concern for The Line. In some smart cities, residents have complained about feeling isolated and bereft of human contact.
South Korea’s $US40 billion smart city Songdo, for example, remains sparsely populated despite hitech features that allow residents to control lights at home from their phones, and that whisk away rubbish in tubes to underground sorting facilities.
This all comes at the cost of human connections, Samia
Khedr, professor of sociology at Ain Shams University in Cairo, said.
‘‘Human connections are a key social infrastructure,’’ she said.
‘‘Complex data infrastructure does not usually cater to important social and cultural needs that are paramount to urban life.’’
At least one Saudi citizen appeared to agree, urging investment in real life and in living cities.
‘‘Is it not better to spend the billions spent on Neom on upgrading the real cities in the remaining parts of the kingdom?’’ Fahd Alghofaili wrote on Twitter.