Privacy in the Smart City—Applications, Technologies, Challenges, and Solutions
Open accessAbstract
Many modern cities strive to integrate information technology into every aspect of city life to create so-called smart cities. Smart cities rely on a large number of application areas and technologies to realize complex interactions between citizens, third parties, and city departments. This overwhelming complexity is one reason why holistic privacy protection only rarely enters the picture. A lack of privacy can result in discrimination and social sorting, creating a fundamentally unequal society. To prevent this, we believe that a better understanding of smart cities and their privacy implications is needed. We therefore systematize the application areas, enabling technologies, privacy types, attackers, and data sources for the attacks, giving structure to the fuzzy term “smart city.” Based on our taxonomies, we describe existing privacy-enhancing technologies, review the state of the art in real cities around the world, and discuss promising future research directions. Our survey can serve as a reference guide, contributing to the development of privacy-friendly smart cities.
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[89] presents a block matrix data structure for integrity protection with erasure capability, allowing continuous addition of hash-linked records and deletion of records.
“[89], which presents a block matrix data structure for integrity protection with erasure capability. It allows continuous addition of hash-linked records by enabling, at the same time, deletion of records.”
From Privacy-Preserving Solutions for Blockchain: Review and Challenges (2019) · cites this paper as [89]
There are proposals to change blockchain data structures to allow deletion of a transaction without affecting the hash integrity validation of the chain.
“To address this problem, there are proposals to change the blockchain data structures to allow deletion of a transaction, without affecting the hash integrity validation of the chain [89], [139].”
From Privacy-Preserving Solutions for Blockchain: Review and Challenges (2019) · cites this paper as [89]
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Differential Privacy Techniques for Cyber Physical Systems: A Survey
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“Indeed, the survey presented by [41] analyzed the existing privacy-enhancing technologies, and their potential application to smart cities.”
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- Authors
- Eckhoff, D., & Wagner, I.
- Affiliations
- Technical University of Munich (DE)
- De Montfort University (GB)
- Venue
- IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials
- Published
- 2018
- Volume
- 20
- Issue
- 1
- Pages
- 489-516
- ISSN
- 1553-877X (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W2752737474
- Cited by
- 287
- References
- 12
- Citations by year
- 2026: 17 · 2025: 23 · 2024: 42 · 2023: 38 · 2022: 40 · 2021: 54 · 2020: 28 · 2019: 27 · 2018: 17 · 2017: 1
- FWCI
- 16.58
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
- hdl.handle.net
- Locations
- IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials (publishedVersion)
- DMU Open Research Archive (De Montfort University) (submittedVersion)
- Topics
- Physical Sciences › Engineering › Media Technology › Smart Cities and Technologies
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Privacy-Preserving Technologies in Data
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Privacy, Security, and Data Protection
- Keywords
- smart cities, privacy, privacy-enhancing technologies, privacy attacks, data sources, social sorting, discrimination
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