The ‘Capital of Silicon Valley’ is Ignoring its Privacy Experts
In response to taxpayer concern about "smart city" technologies being deployed in San Jose, the city implemented a "Digital Privacy Advisory Taskforce” to monitor the progress of these technical deployments, but the city is at odds with the group providing the advice.
Irina Raicu, a former member of the taskforce and the director of the Internet Ethics program at Santa Clara University’s Markkula Center for Applied Ethics, says that advisory groups like San José’s privacy taskforce can be helpful, but they shouldn’t be considered a substitute to well-funded privacy and cybersecurity teams.
“Any city that adds more tools for data collection and analysis, for whatever purposes, needs to scale up its privacy and cybersecurity team correspondingly,” she told Motherboard in an email. “There needs to be enough staff members to assess purchase proposals, develop policies for deployment, track the implementation of those policies, and, if necessary, flag any issues that arise before they lead to harm.”
Irina Raicu, director of internet ethics, quoted by Vice.