Netflix is launching on Comcast’s X1 set-top boxes nationwide this week, as two companies that were formerly bitter enemies have found a way to make money together.
“Netflix content will be fully integrated into [Comcast’s] Xfinity On Demand,” the companies said in an announcement Friday. The companies’ mutual customers will be able to “seamlessly move between the Netflix app and their cable service” without having to “change inputs or juggle remotes,” Netflix CEO Reed Hastings said. Comcast’s voice search will work with Netflix, and customers will be able to “browse Netflix content alongside other on-demand movies and shows.”
The Netflix/Comcast integration was reported in July, though it’s just making its way to customers now.
Netflix and Comcast previously fought over several issues. After demanding a free connection to Comcast’s network, Netflix relented in early 2014 when it decided to pay Comcast for network interconnection. Netflix later opposed Comcast’s attempt to buy Time Warner Cable, which was blocked by federal regulators because of concerns that a bigger Comcast would squash competition from online video providers like Netflix.
Netflix has also criticized Comcast‘s data caps and asked the Federal Communications Commission to take action against home Internet data caps in general. Despite being integrated into the Comcast set-top box, Netflix video will continue to count against Comcast’s 1TB-per-month cap.
“Video in the Netflix app on Xfinity X1 is streamed over the Internet,” a Comcast FAQ says. “For this reason, usage of the Netflix app on X1 and all other programming and content from the Internet on X1… are subject to Xfinity Internet data usage policies.” Netflix standard definition video usually uses up 1GB per hour while HD video uses 3GB per hour.
Exact details of the financial arrangement between Netflix and Comcast haven’t been released. Customers will be able to sign up for Netflix through the Comcast interface and pay for Netflix on their Comcast bills.
Facebook is working to bring its controversial Free Basics program, which promises to get more low-income users onto the internet by providing free access to a curated and limited set of online resources, to the US. In October, the Washington Post reported that Facebook has been courting White House favor for CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s pet project in hopes of avoiding the public furor that led regulators in India and Egypt to ban the platform over concerns it violated principles of an open, equal internet.
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About
Rachita Taneja (@visualfumble) is a campaigns manager at Jhatkaa.org in India; she is also part of the Internet Freedom Foundation. Mark Tseng Putterman (@tsengputterman) is the media justice campaigner at 18MillionRising.org, where he focuses on internet, technology, and media issues through an Asian-American racial justice lens.
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Facebook claims Free Basics is the solution to getting internet access to more of the estimated 4.2 billion people worldwide who are still offline. At the same time, many American mobile service providers are already touting their own “zero-rating†programs, which allow customers to access selected content without it counting towards data caps. This is meant as a salve for disparities in broadband access, especially as more and more Americans rely solely on mobile broadband for internet access. But here’s the thing: It’s a farce. As Indian and American activists fighting for both internet access and internet freedom, we know that letting corporations dictate our choices online will not build the digital future we’re fighting for.
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Far from philanthropy, Free Basics and other zero-rating programs are ways for corporations to set themselves up as internet gatekeepers for the rapidly growing population of internet users. Rather than granting equal access to the vastness of the world wide web, Free Basics corrals users in a restricted platform consisting of a small set of websites and apps chosen by Facebook and its corporate partners. Indian activists put it succinctly when they called the platform “poor internet for poor people.â€
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Facebook aggressively countered that messaging with a paternalistic ad campaign that argued that CEO Mark Zuckerberg, not Indian net neutrality activists, had India’s best interests in mind. Still, more than 375,000 concerned Indian citizens opposed the platform and argued that net neutrality principles, which dictate that all content online should be treated equally, aren’t just a first-world privilege.
Their argument resonated all the way from Bangalore’s tech industry to activists in the Indian-American diaspora, catalyzing a transnational campaign that successfully moved Indian regulators to ban not just Free Basics, but all zero-rating and differential pricing programs that charge differently for data services based on content, in a landmark ruling this February.
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As news breaks that Facebook is turning its “philanthropic†eye towards the US, we must rally against the notion that expanding internet access necessitates restricting users’ choices and experiences online. We would do well to embrace a new take on an old economics trope: there’s no such thing as free internet.Â
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US net neutrality advocates have already set sights on problematic zero-rating programs that allow providers to pick winners and losers online while limiting the choices of low-income customers. And even Comcast vice president Jason Livingood has admitted that the company’s data caps and overage fees are a “business policy†rather than a technological necessity. Researchers have also found that data caps do little, if anything, to manage network congestion. Such revelations debunk the claim that “free data†is some expression of corporate benevolence. Rather than helping close the digital divide, as some ISP surrogates argue, data caps and zero-rating programs create artificial scarcity that disproportionately harms low-income consumers.Â
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The defense of an open internet is also intimately tied to work for racial justice. In the US, we know that black, Latino, and immigrant communities are significantly less likely to have high-speed internet access at home than the broader population. Costs are driving more and more households to forgo pricey home broadband service and rely on smartphones alone to get online. For these users, mobile zero-rating programs like Free Basics might seem like a welcome respite from onerous data limits. But in the long term, such programs limit all of our options online, threatening to create the sort of two-tiered internet that Facebook itself fought to oppose when it lobbied the FCC to reclassify broadband as a utility in 2014.Â
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Free Basics and zero-rating programs also pose serious threats to our ability to organize social movements online. From #BlackLivesMatter to the Arab Spring, the open spread of information online has allowed activists to build power in unprecedented ways. Facebook specifically has come under fire for deactivating the profile of Korryn Gaines during her fatal standoff with police, and for censoring a livestream from Dakota Access Pipeline protests at Standing Rock. Making corporations the arbiters of what content is made available to zero-rating subscribers not only has classist, racist implications: It threatens to give Facebook and other companies the power to control the free flow of information and silence social movements.
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Internet advocates across the world who rallied behind Indian efforts to “save the internet†must come together again to oppose Free Basics’ entry to the US. Ironically, programs like Free Basics give big companies an edge over startups and independent content, robbing the internet of the very spirit of innovation that allowed Facebook to grow from a dorm room side project to the world’s largest social network. Getting more people online is necessary, crucial work. But we don’t believe poor people deserve poor internet. If Facebook is serious about getting more people online, it needs to do the real work of helping grow the open internet for everyone.
Dystopian corporate surveillance threats today come at us from all directions. Companies offer “always-on†devices that listen for our voice commands, and marketers follow us around the web to create personalized user profiles so they can (maybe) show us ads we’ll actually click. Now marketers have been experimenting with combining those web-based and audio approaches to track consumers in another disturbingly science fictional way: with audio signals your phone can hear, but you can’t. And though you probably have no idea that dog whistle marketing is going on, researchers are already offering ways to protect yourself.
The technology, called ultrasonic cross-device tracking, embeds high-frequency tones that are inaudible to humans in advertisements, web pages, and even physical locations like retail stores. These ultrasound “beacons†emit their audio sequences with speakers, and almost any device microphone—like those accessed by an app on a smartphone or tablet—can detect the signal and start to put together a picture of what ads you’ve seen, what sites you’ve perused, and even where you’ve been. Now that you’re sufficiently concerned, the good news is that at the Black Hat Europe security conference on Thursday, a group based at University of California, Santa Barbara will present an Android patch and a Chrome extension that give consumers more control over the transmission and receipt of ultrasonic pitches on their devices.
Beyond the abstract creep factor of ultrasonic tracking, the larger worry about the technology is that it requires giving an app the ability to listen to everything around you, says Vasilios Mavroudis, a privacy and security researcher at University College London who worked on the research being presented at Black Hat. “The bad thing is that if you’re a company that wants to provide ultrasound tracking there is no other way to do it currently, you have to use the microphone,†says Mavroudis.  “So you will be what we call ‘over-privileged,’ because you don’t need access to audible sounds but you have to get them.â€
This type of tracking, offered by companies like Tapad and 4Info, has hardly exploded in adoption. But it’s persisted as more third party companies develop ultrasonic tools for a range of uses, like data transmission without Wi-Fi or other connectivity. The more the technology evolves, the easier it is to use in marketing. As a result, the researchers say that their goal is to help protect users from inadvertently leaking their personal information. “There are certain serious security shortcomings that need to be addressed before the technology becomes more widely used,†says Mavroudis. “And there is a lack of transparency. Users are basically clueless about what’s going on.â€
Currently, when Android or iOS do require apps to request permission to use a phone’s microphone. But most users likely aren’t aware that by granting that permission, apps that use ultrasonic tracking could access their microphone—and everything it’s picking up, not just ultrasonic frequencies—all the time, even while they’re running in the background.
The researchers’ patch adjusts Android’s permission system so that apps have to make it clear that they’re asking for permission to receive inaudible inputs. It also allows users to choose to block anything the microphone picks up on the ultrasound spectrum. The patch isn’t an official Google release, but represents the researchers’ recommendations for a step mobile operating systems can take to offer more transparency.
To block the other end of those high-pitched audio communications, the group’s Chrome extension preemptively screens websites’ audio components as they load to keep the ones that emit ultrasounds from executing, thus blocking pages from emitting them. There are a few old services that the extension can’t screen, like Flash, but overall the extension works much like an ad-blocker for ultrasonic tracking. The researchers plan to post their patch and their extension available for download after their Black Hat presentation.
Ultrasonic tracking has been evolving for the last couple of years, and it is relatively easy to deploy since it relies on basic speakers and microphones instead of specialized equipment. But from the start, the technology has encountered pushback about its privacy and security limitations. Currently there are no industry standards for legitimizing beacons or allowing them to interoperate the way there are with a protocol like Bluetooth. And ultrasonic tracking transmissions are difficult to secure because they need to happen quickly for the technology to work. Ideally the beacons would authenticate with the receiving apps each time they interact to reduce the possibility that a hacker could create phony beacons by manipulating the tones before sending them. But the beacons need to complete their transmissions in the time it takes someone to briefly check a website or pass a store, and it’s difficult to fit an authentication process into those few seconds. The researchers say they’ve already observed one type of real-world attack in which hackers replay a beacon over and over to skew analytics data or alter the reported behavior of a user. The team also developed other types of theoretical attacks that take advantage of the lack of encryption and authentication on beacons.
The Federal Trade Commission evaluated ultrasonic tracking technology at the end of 2015, and the privacy-focused non-profit Center for Democracy and Technology wrote to the agency at the time that “the best solution is increased transparency and a robust and meaningful opt-out system. If cross-device tracking companies cannot give users these types of notice and control, they should not engage in cross-device tracking.†By March the FTC had drafted a warning letter to developers about a certain brand of audio beacon that could potentially track all of a users’ television viewing without their knowledge. That company, called Silverpush, has since ceased working on ultrasonic tracking in the United States, though the firm said at the time that its decision to drop the tech wasn’t related to the FTC probe.
More recently, two lawsuits filed this fall—each about the Android app of an NBA team—allege that the apps activated user microphones improperly to listen for beacons, capturing lots of other audio in the process without user knowledge. Two defendants in those lawsuits, YinzCam and Signal360, both told WIRED that they aren’t beacon developers themselves and don’t collect or store any audio in the spectrum that’s audible to humans.
But the researchers presenting at Black Hat argue that controversy over just how much audio ultrasonic tracking tools collect is all the more reason to create industry standards, so that consumers don’t need to rely on companies to make privacy-minded choices independently. “I don’t believe that companies are malicious, but currently the way this whole thing is implemented seems very shady to users,†says Mavroudis. Once there are standards in place, the researchers propose that mobile operating systems like Android and iOS could provide application program interfaces that restrict microphone access so ultrasonic tracking apps can only receive relevant data, instead of everything the microphone is picking up. “Then we get rid of this overprivileged problem where apps need to have access to the microphone, because they will just need to have access to this API,†Mavroudis says.
For anyone who’s not waiting for companies to rein in what kinds of audio they collect to track us, however, the UCSB and UCL researchers software offers a temporary fix. And that may be more appealing than the notion of your phone talking to advertisers behind your back—or beyond your audible spectrum.
It’s tough for open-water swimmers to cut through waves in a straight line. OnCourse Goggles keep them on track, no surfacing necessary. To set a route, a swimmer sights a way-point and clicks a button to lock it into an electronic compass and shore up the path. Green, yellow and red LEDs in the corner of each eye provide direction. Green in both means on course, red in the right eye means veer left, and vice versa. $200 (est.)
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When Starcraft was introduced to the world in 1998, it put stranded humans in a dangerous universe, surrounded by more advanced and more primal foes. The venerable real time strategy series, with a trio of balanced species fighting for survival in a grimdark future, is over 18 years old. The first game and its expansion defined a generation of videogames-as-sports, and the latest incarnations are still played at the highest level. Minute decisions, from resource spending sequence to exact placement of buildings, are studied, scrutinized, and adapted by players for new advantage, creating a thriving, adaptive theater of war.
Today, AI itself is getting in on the action. The Starcraft games always shipped with programming that allowed human players to try their hand against automated rivals, but while that AI was toggled to a different difficulty setting, the game was generally the same each time. No, today Blizzard, the makers of Starcraft and its successors, are opening up the game to an AI that learns. Specifically, Google’s DeepMind.
We’ve seen DeepMind learn how to navigate mazes, and we’ve seen it compete against top human players at the strategy game “Goâ€. Mazes are static, and Go has the same fixed board every time, with players taking turns to learn it. Starcraft presents a far more complex task, with two players managing resources, unit production, exploration, and research at the same time, over maps with terrain that can change and be destroyed.
As Google describes it in the release, the agents must demonstrate effective use of memory and planning, but also play within the limits of human dexterity.
For DeepMind to learn the game, it’s going to have an API that lets it see the pixels of the game itself. And, like any new player learning the game, it will have tutorial sessions, as it figures out the basics. These are questions like how many pylons to construct (additional ones), should you train units other than marines (only in rare circumstances), and is there anything better than successfully pulling off a zerg rush (no, no there is not). Soon enough, DeepMind could be playing with the best of them, in their bases and killing their dudes.
Watch how DeepMind perceives the game, below:
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The Electoral College is an integral, if not unusual, part of American democracy. Few other nations have one, and even when they do the system isn’t quite the same. How does the electoral college work and why do we even have one? Our latest video explains.
There are few places better positioned to become a "smart city" than Singapore.
That’s an easy statement to justify. Singapore is an island city-state just 30 miles across that has been governed by the same party for decades. Putting the implied democratic flaws to one side, the geography and political stability of Singapore have aided the city in preparing for the future.
Two years ago, those preparations got a name: "Smart Nation," an ambitious program to push the city, its residents and its government into the digital age. Or perhaps, even further. A fiber network already stretches the length and breadth of the island, bringing high-speed internet access to every home and office; there are already three mobile devices for every two of its citizens. This is about the next step.
The Smart Nation initiative looks to turn the island into a "living laboratory" — a kind of playground for testing smart solutions to urban issues. Part of that plan is a network of sensors placed across the island that officials hope can solve the fundamental issues of Singapore’s high-density living.
Speaking with Engadget, Dr. Vivian Balakrishnan, the country’s minister for foreign affairs and minister-in-charge of the Smart Nation Initiative, spelled out how he believes the program will transform Singapore.
"There is much political angst about inequality and middle-class stagnation in developed economies," he said. "This has been accompanied by loud, populist and ultimately futile arguments about yesterday’s ideology and politics. … In Singapore, we know that new technology trumps politics as usual."
What Dr. Balakrishnan is alluding to is that, rather than being about talk, Smart Nation is about action. It’s pushing forward with trials across many sectors, focusing on "areas with high impact on residents and citizens." For now, that means housing, health and transport.
At home
When you think of public housing, your mind probably goes to the low-income tower blocks in generally deprived areas around North America and Europe. In Singapore, the scope of public housing is far more broad. More than 80 percent of residents (3.2 million people) live in affordable apartments maintained by the country’s Housing and Development Board (HDB). This huge pool of public housing provides an unparalleled testing ground for some of Smart Nation’s ideas.
In the Yuhua estate, one of the first neighborhoods to "go smart," thousands of sensors have been installed to keep tabs on individual apartments. In partnership with private companies, authorities are able to measure energy draw, waste production and water usage in real time. The latter is a real issue for an island that, although making strides toward water independence, still imports tens of billions of gallons of water from neighboring Malaysia each year. As part of the pilot, Yuhua has also "gone green," with a new vacuum waste-management system, solar panels and water-reclamation efforts.
Through smart applications, the sensors provide residents with feedback on their behavior, helping them to use less water, electricity and so on, driving down household costs. The government, in turn, is able to aggregate this data, using analytics and computer simulation to improve the planning, design and maintenance of public housing estates. And that pattern — programs benefiting both individuals and the country as a whole — repeats itself throughout Smart Nation’s myriad initiatives.
Health
Many developed nations are facing the same problems right now: an aging population and the increasing cost of caring for it. Those costs are not only related to medical expenses, though. Singapore is a nation with a culturally embedded sense of filial piety, and as the pool of elderly increases, so too will the amount of time family members spend caring for them, rather than working.
When it comes to health care, Smart Nation is centered on reducing that burden. For the past two years, Singapore has been testing an "Elderly Monitoring System" (EMS), a noninvasive program that uses sensors on doors and inside rooms to monitor movement. If there’s a lack of activity or the system detects some other incident, the caregiver, be it a family member or a professional, is alerted instantly.
The trial is opt-in and, as Dr. Balakrishnan explained, is meant to "ensure peace of mind for those with elderly family members." As beneficial as it may be for families of at-risk people, the effort seems as much about reducing the cultural stigma of not "doing your familial duty" by constantly checking up on people.
The private sector is involved in the rollout of EMS. Where this partnership differs from the energy monitoring schemes is who will pick up the tab. During the trial period, the government is handling costs, but it’s expected that residents with the means to pay will do so when the service goes into full operation. Commercialization of initiatives is seen as key for driving Smart Nation forward — the government supplies the "laboratory" for businesses to flourish in.
Another health-care pilot revolves around "Tele-health" — the idea that you don’t need to leave your house, or even see a doctor, to get medical treatment. A "tele-rehabilitation" trial began in late 2014 and is nearing completion. It aims to offer stroke patients the chance to rehabilitate without traveling to hospitals or health centers. "Tele-health allows you to receive treatment in the comfort of your home, to remain longer with your family and community without going to the hospital, or to provide greater peace of mind for caregivers of loved ones while freeing up hospital beds for those who really need them," Dr. Balakrishnan said.
In the trial, tablets guide patients through exercises. While they go through the motions, sensors and cameras capture footage for therapists to review remotely. Once a week, the tablets are used for face-to-face video conferences between doctors and patients. Just under a hundred citizens have taken part in the trial, which has a control group to compare the methods against traditional therapy. The results are expected to be published next year.
On the road
Transport is the obvious poster child for the "living laboratory" strategy. Singapore has been at the forefront of autonomous-vehicle testing, opening its streets to self-driving cars and buses. Small-scale trials of shuttles began at Nanyang Technological University three years ago, and more recently MIT spin-off nuTonomy started testing autonomous taxis on the city’s streets. But while these efforts continue — just last week a plan for a full-size robotic bus serving NTU was announced — there are efforts beyond self-driving vehicles.
Sensors are at the heart of Smart Nation, and the government has been using them to track its bus fleets. By crunching data, it’s able to identify problem areas and formulate solutions to work around them. Dr. Balakrishnan said that by identifying where more buses were needed this initiative has already "resulted in a 90 percent reduction in crowdedness" and reduced wait times on popular services three to five minutes. The next step is private transport.
Singapore has taxed cars using an electronic road-toll-collection system for over a decade, but the next iteration of that system, due in 2020, will be much more comprehensive. It calls for a government-mandated satellite-navigation system in all vehicles. The system will silently monitor where a car is at any given time, opening a wealth of data for analysis. Authorities will be able to monitor traffic conditions nationwide, from volume to average speed, highlighting congestion and issues with road layout. This level of traffic monitoring — knowing exactly where every car on the road is at any given time — is unprecedented.
An infographic highlighting the new system’s benefits.
Again, this tech is being sold on its immediate benefits to citizens: "The next-generation ERP system can also provide value-added services that are beneficial to motorists," Dr. Balakrishnan said. Roadside parking meters will be scrapped, as fees will be generated and paid automatically, just like road tolls. This ties into another government push, away from cash and towards electronic payments. The traffic system will also aggregate data to provide "timely and accurate traffic information to motorists."
Virtual Singapore
Taken on their own, each of these initiatives is small, but the sensors all come together to form a platform called "Virtual Singapore." Being built, again, through a public-private partnership, Virtual Singapore is a model of the island built not just to scale, but with fastidious detail. It contains the exact dimensions of every building, where the windows are located, and even what it’s built out of. Think of it like Google or Apple Maps’ 3D modes, but with the ability to enter every building and see its layout. On its own, the model will be impressive, but it’s when sensor data is fed in that things get interesting, offering an unparalleled view of the city.
Consider this for a moment. The data of an entire city, contained within a scale model. The movement of every car; the flow of water, electricity and waste, all in one place. Now add in the output of each security camera; air-quality measurements (a pilot program has students wearing sensors to detect such environmental factors), crowd-density views, noise levels and more. A living, breathing city. Or at least a to-scale model of one. It’s the sort of thing city planners dream of.
And it’ll be open to everyone — to an extent.
A screenshot from an early build of the Virtual Singapore platform.
Dassault Systèmes
Dr. Balakrishnan explained that Virtual Singapore is intended to be a "collaborative data platform where researchers, citizens and businesses may contribute." It’ll help visualize all the data being collated and allow for complex simulations. Plug the plans for a new building development in, and the model might reveal how it would affect airflow, telecommunications signals or plant life in the nearby areas. It could show where more buses are needed, or which transit stops are being underused. In health care, it could be used to predict how disease might propagate — Singapore has the third-highest population density of any city, and protecting against a pandemic is a high priority.
Some of this information is already available to the public; Singaporeans can access traffic and parking data, security cameras and other public data online. With Virtual Singapore, there will be better data, and much more of it.
A smarter world
Singapore’s unique geopolitics are key to positioning itself as a living laboratory. All these ideas can be tested, and potentially commercialized, without the usual difficulties of regulatory approval. Rolling them out worldwide will be more difficult, for sure, but Dr. Balkrishnan believes the initiatives can be "customized and applied to other cities around the world."
While it’s difficult to see New York City putting satellite-navigation devices into cars, there are ways similar data could be collected. The world is pushing rapidly toward autonomous vehicles, and within the decades, it’s likely that the majority of cars will be collecting far more data on their environments and traffic conditions than they are now. It’s not impossible to see a future in which this data is anonymously aggregated and used to improve our road layouts and traffic flow.
Virtual Singapore can be used to run simulations.
The same logic can also be applied the home. Our apartments and houses are increasingly becoming smarter, with utility companies offering real-time updates on usage. By the will of the market alone, we will be in a position in which troves of figures are being pooled by energy companies. If Singapore can prove there are good uses for this data, then we may see it, again, aggregated and used in similar ways.
And that’s a side-goal for Smart Nation: to make the country the benchmark for how future cities should function. "If you visit Singapore," Balakrishnan said, "you should be able to say, ‘I have seen the future — and it works.’"
Trust and transparency
Whenever I’ve explained Smart Nation and Virtual Singapore to someone new, their reaction roughly falls into one of three camps: "That’s amazing," "That’s creepy" or "That’s amazing and creepy."
There are obvious privacy and security issues with almost every aspect of the initiative. To understand why people might have reservations, you need only look at the political landscape of the country itself: Singapore places 74th on the democracy index, which lists it as "flawed"; the independent democracy watchdog Freedom House lists the country as only "partly free," ranking it four out of seven (one is best) for freedom, civil liberties and political rights; and that’s not to mention the government’s broad-reaching online surveillance powers.
But despite its issues, only four countries’ governments are more trusted (according to Edelman’s "Trust Barometer) than the Singaporean authorities, and the country ranks exceptionally high in quality-of-life studies. There are a few nods to privacy and transparency in the Smart Nation plans. For example, Dr. Balakrishnan said that only "anonymized traffic data will be collected and aggregated" when cars are not on priced roads. (Given that there are many toll roads in Singapore, and the system will also record when cars are stopped in paid parking spots and public lots, though, there will still be a lot of location data on offer.)
Dr. Balakrishnan also spoke of "open data" and building Singapore into "an ‘open-source’ society that’s characterized by high levels of trust, transparency and openness." Additionally, officials will "engage independent security consultants" to audit the system to ensure it’s "secured and trusted throughout its operation."
Singapore can be a living laboratory for experimentation, for Smart City solutions to be tested, and eventually commercialized; and hopefully some of these can also be customized and applied to other cities around the world. If you visit Singapore, you should be able to say ‘I have seen the future – and it works’
Vivian Balakrishnan
But just how trusting are Singaporeans, knowing just how much data will be gathered? I spoke with people from the business world and the press to gauge their reaction to Smart Nation, and none took real issue with the plan. "The threat of letting our government have all this data is not significantly different from all the data we’re letting Google [as a private company] have," one business owner, speaking anonymously, said.
But it’s not just the government involved. A large part of the Smart Nation pitch is about bringing government, businesses and citizens together to find solutions. Citizens increasingly "demand higher quality public services" that "respond in real-time, preferably immediately," said Dr. Balakrishnan. And the private sector is key to achieving that.
The government has committed to releasing more government data "in a machine-readable format" while "streamlining approval processes" so that public and third-party devs can access the relevant APIs faster. This approval system will be key. Businesses will obviously be approaching the data with an eye on profits, and deciding which companies can access what data will require a firm understanding of all the industries involved.
"It’s likely that at some point the parties involved — government, private sector and hopefully citizens — need to have a dialogue about defining the parameters of a win-win situation," said a business owner.
"[One] where private-citizen data is used to create schemes that result in economic good as well as a proportional growth in the average citizen’s quality of life."
For Singaporeans, it’s all a question of balance: How much private data do you want to hand over in the name of economic growth and convenience?
