Unchecked Smart Cities are Surveillance Cities. What We Need are Smart Enough Cities.

We can have beautiful cities without turning our cities into surveillance cities.

Cities across the U.S. are forcing operators of shared bikes and scooters to use dangerous and privacy invasive APIs developed by the Los Angeles Department of Transportation. These APIs—collectively called the “mobility data specification,” or MDS—require that operators share granular location data on every trip taken. The location data that cities are demanding is incredibly sensitive and relates to the movements of real people. And some cities, like Los Angeles and soon Santa Monica and Washington, D.C., even require that the data be shared with a five-second delay—essentially in real-time.

The local authorities demanding access to individual trip data are failing to comply with existing privacy protections in the law. Meanwhile, cities cannot point to even a single use case to show why they need access to the individual level trip data. That means cities are recklessly and illegally stockpiling sensitive location data that they do not need.