Current status of smart systems and case studies of privacy protection platform for smart city in Japan

This paper is to clarify the current status of smart systems and discuss the progressive formation of the privacy protection ecosystem for smart cities in Japan. The authors surveyed representative smart city projects, promotion groups, and several privacy protection platforms as case studies. As a result, the authors obtained the following three findings. First, Smart Grids and Smart Intelligent Transport Systems have been progressing steadily. Second, several proof of concept in privacy protection platforms have started recently. Third, these privacy protection platforms are classified into two types: a centralized model and a distributed model. Therefore, it is important for the progressive formation of privacy protection platforms in smart cities not only to integrate the centralized model and the distributed model with a hybrid model based on the structure of Multi-sided Markets and Freemium business model, but also to examine a trust framework of privacy property to formulate its secured services at a low price, before full-scale smart systems come into use.

I. Introduction

Making a city “smart” is emerging as a strategy to mitigate the problems generated by urban population growth and rapid urbanization [5]. The term “smart” is considered to mean performing in a forward-looking way [13]. The forward-looking development approach to a smart city considers issues such as awareness, flexibility, transformability, synergy, individuality, self-decisiveness, and strategic behavior [13]. Environmentally developed cities introduce a Smart Growth policy. Smart Growth entails cohesive urban and regional planning principles and adopts an approach to achieving communities that are socially, economically, and environmentally sustainable, using comprehensive planning to guide, design, develop, manage, revitalize, and build inclusive communities and regions [1]. The Smart city is one of the most important paths to realizing the principles of Smart Growth. We consider a city to be smart when investments in human and social capital and traditional (transport) and modern (ICT) communication infrastructure fuel sustainable economic growth and a high quality of life with wise management of natural resources through participatory governance [3]. Smart systems are ICT infrastructures that fuel sustainable economic growth and a high quality of life. A smart system, as a method of realizing various social system, provides services such as life support or life care by processes associated with great varieties of sensors and actuators situated in the life space [30]. A smarter city constitutes a “system of systems”-a set of interdependent public and private systems that the city can integrate and optimize to achieve a new level of effectiveness and efficiency [29]. The ability of smart systems to sense, aggregate and integrate massive amounts of data has the potential capacity not only to enrich the quality of citizens' daily lives, but also to endanger the privacy of citizens. The ability to quickly search large databases creates the potential for profiling, data mining, data misuse and function creep [11]. Therefore, privacy challenges are inherent in the implementation of smart systems due to the enhanced ability to track and collect massive amounts of personal information and data on citizens' everyday interactions. On the other hand, the cost of preventing cyber-terrorism still appears to very largely outweigh the potential public benefits [6]. Before smart software can be used in full scale, the concomitant security and privacy concerns must be evaluated [39]. Cavoukian et al [4] defined the term “Smart Privacy” and seven Privacy by Design foundational principles to describe the holistic approach necessary to realizing the objective of all-encompassing data protection. The main research challenges in managing smarter city data are the need for common information models and the ability to share information safely across multiple agencies within a city and among multiple cities in a metropolitan region [29].