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Digital Life
INTERVIEW
Liesbet van Zoonen
THE BOLD CITY: SHAPING
SOCIETY WITH BIG DATA
people oppose
the idea of their
medical data being
stored in a digital
patient file,
but they happily
post messages on
Facebook to say they
are lying in bed.
THE IDEA THAT WE CAN SHAPE OUR SOCIETY
WITH BIG DATA IS GROWING
How do surveillance cameras make us feel: safer or spied
on? If your local council sends you an email about renewing your
driver’s licence, is this considered good service or infringement of
privacy? Liesbet van Zoonen is professor of sociology at the Erasmus
University and director of the Centre for BOLD Cities, a joint initiative
of the Erasmus University, TU Delft and Leiden University. She and
fellow researchers at the Centre look at how users of cities (from
residents to tourists) can become more data literate and engage better
with the data that is available.
What is a BOLD city?
“BOLD stands for Big, Open,
Linked Data. A BOLD city is
slightly different from a ‘smart
city’ which is the more common
term to talk about smart public
management of infrastructures,
such as transport, energy or water.
But a city doesn’t only consist of
infrastructure, and with BOLD
cities you recognise that there is
much more going on, also nongovernmental,
especially through
city users’ smartphones. We have
access to so many more types of
data and we can also speak about
Open [source] or Linked Data.
Hence the name BOLD.”
How do you involve citizens in a
discussion about data and local
developments?
“The idea that we can shape our
society with Big Data is growing,
and policymakers and urban
planners are eager to work with
data. At the same time, they are
concerned about privacy and the
need to involve citizens in this
process. We tend to forget that the
people who live, work or study in
a city may not have any idea what
is going on. The first step is to
raise awareness through a variety
of participatory methods. But as a
city you also need to make political
decisions about issues, such as
which groups of citizens do you want to involve, how
should you talk to them about changes, and what
would be the preferable outcome of these interactions?
Our research will provide the resources for such
discussions.”
The Centre for BOLD cities is located in Rotterdam.
Is the city’s municipality making these steps right
now?
“In Rotterdam, there are a relatively high number
of people who don’t have any experience with
computers. One of the things we do is take people
out on data-walks. We show them, for instance, what
is happening when you pass a surveillance camera,
which is relatively well-known technology. We
also show them which data streams are completely
invisible, but crucial, to everyday life in the city: think
of air-quality sensors or smart garbage bins. We also
discuss questions like who owns the data. Could you
get access to it – and would you want to?”
How do people respond to their data being
collected?
“On the one hand, people are concerned about their
privacy, but on the other hand they are happy to
share it. For example, people oppose the idea of their
medical data being stored in a digital patient file, but
they happily post messages on Facebook to say they
are lying in bed. People fear that the government wants
to collect their data, but they don’t have any objections
against supermarket discount-cards that track their
shopping habits. This is called the Privacy Paradox.”
What about protecting people’s identity and
identity management?
“People do not think of themselves as series of data:
we feel we have been shaped by many different
experiences and are more than just numbers. From
a data perspective, identity management revolves
around the question: How do we shape online
identities in a way that they can be used for the actual
authentication of a person and how can we secure this
data? The Dutch government, for instance, is in the
middle of renovating their DigiD system to be able to
offer more diverse possibilities for identification. Big
businesses are also searching for the most secure and
easy way of identification and authentication: from
face-to-face encounters to facial recognition based on
your smile.”
Which groups in our society will encounter
the most problems with these new ways of
identification? Isn’t there a fear that, for instance,
elderly people cannot keep up with these
developments?
“You will always have a small percentage of people
who cannot keep up regardless of the technology, and
you need to be sensitive to who they might be. While
you might think that the elderly will struggle, young
people too may not be very capable, especially in their
interaction with the government. In Denmark, the
government noticed that adolescents didn’t respond to
emails or other forms of digital communication from
the government. Why? Because they did not see the
point. You can’t assume anything in this field.”
You will always have a small percentage of people who
cannot keep up regardless of the technology, and you need
to be sensitive to who theY might be.
Digital Life