Digital society, ethics and law in the Internet of Things Assignment | Get Paper Help

CASE STUDY 1: Digital society, ethics and law in the Internet of Things
Below you will find a case on digital society, ethics and law. You will need to read the case, the
accompanying material provided and to do research on your own, to consider the following
questions and answer them in a maximum of 500 words:
Your answer needs to be submitted via Turnitin. Any other kind of submission will not be
accepted. Date for submission will be posted on the Turnitin assignment, in Moodle.
Questions:
1. On a disused strip of land on the city of this case, which is close to a lake, tech company
Goodlife Labs proposes creating a city of the future, using arrays of sensors to measure
residents’ movements and learn how to design streets, buildings and transportation to
improve their lives in measurable ways. But who gets to control, access and profit from the
data?
2. What should consent to use personal data look like in a smart city? How can people who
have concerns about data collection opt out while continuing to enjoy public spaces?
Should data from public spaces be made public by default? Yes, no and why?
3. At a time of scarce resources and competing priorities Goodlife’s plans require public
resources to be siphoned off from other parts of the city where they are desperately
needed. If the development of the waterfront is so dependent on public resources, then
why is all the development in private hands? Should a discussion of public ownership, cooperative
development of housing and even workspaces take place? Why? Should more
discussion about public space and common wealth and less about privately controlled
public space and private wealth take place? Why?
The case of the smart city “Cool Path” and Goodlife Labs
I) Who is who in this case?
• Goodlife Labs: A New York-based research firm owned by Google’s parent company
Alphabet Inc., Goodlife Labs describes its mission as “reimagining cities to improve quality
of life.” Its CEO is Daniel D., a former New York deputy mayor and one of the leaders of the
city’s post Sept. 11, 2001 redevelopment.
• Dreamseafront: A government agency created in 2001 by the governments of the country,
the province and the city to revitalize the city’s disused waterfront lands. The province
usually has four members on the board; one of them quit last summer, and the Progressive
Conservative government fired three of the others potentially reshaping the role and
agenda of the agency. The municipal and federal governments have come out in support of
Dreamseafront’s leadership. The Mayor stepped in to save Dreamseafront’s board from
losing yet another member in December, shortly after the provincial government fired its
three appointees over concerns about the agency’s proposed development.
• Cool Path: This is the project name for the collaboration between Goodlife Labs and
Dreamseafront to design and build the Seafront project.
II) The case
When it was announced in October of 2017, Cool Path was advertised as the world’s biggest
example of the “smart city,” using data to invent a new urban landscape. Goodlife Labs’ initial
proposal for the 12-acre site called for traffic sensors to help move residents more quickly and
smoothly and a smart energy grid that would keep power use low. The hope for Cool Path was that
it would lay the groundwork for a bigger redevelopment of 750 acres of the Port Lands.
After a somewhat scaled down follow-up plan was released over the summer of 2018, Goodlife
Labs went to the citizens of the city and Dreamseafront with a public presentation of the new plan,
promising expansive public spaces, mostly pedestrian-only streets and a system of color-changing
BUSINESS LAW
CASE STUDY 1: DSELIoT
Professor: Dr. Begoña G. Otero
Case Study 1 is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
road tiles to assign new uses for the public space. Goodlife Labs’ site plan gave more concrete
numbers about the real-estate space it expected to create, most of which would be made with
engineered wood, creating buildings up to 30 floors tall. Goodlife gave Dreamseafront a draft of its
final plan in June and it was made public by the end of the month.
But the size of the project has made many government watchdogs and advocacy groups wary of
committing so much to one company. The Civil Liberties Association decided to sue all levels
involved in the project, arguing that the surveillance technology would violate privacy rights.
Another civil group, New Democrats, though an ethics committee study on privacy, are urging the
government to put the project on hold until all citizens are consulted in more detail. Then there’s
the city’s Auditor-General Ms. T, who issued a report that found Dreamseafront gave Goodlife Lab’s
preferential treatment in selecting it as its partner for the smart city. Ms. T said this raised “the risk
of an unfair and unequal advantage to all parties that would be responding to the procurement
call,” and urged more government study of the project.
In June, Goodlife Labs unveiled a blueprint to spend more than $1.3-billion over the next 20 years
to plan and partly build a 190-acre “IDEA district” on the city’s eastern waterfront, outlining a vision
for a technology-driven neighborhood that is much larger than its original proposal.
In the agreement between Dreamseafront and Goodlife Labs, they established eleven different
“pillars” to develop the plan:
• Mobility: A mixed mobility environment where motor traffic can be mixed with cycling and
walking
• Public realm: Stimulating public activity to deliver a more usable and enjoyable public
spaces
• Buildings: Creating adaptable and flexible building modules
• Community and city services: Connecting people through digital technologies that allow
them to communicate better and empower the community
• Sustainability: Creating climate-positive communities that pursue negative carbon
emission.
• Digital platform: Creating a digital layer that can be integrated with the physical layer from
the first place.
• Privacy and data governance: Creating robust use-cases of data governance and
considering privacy as a major concern.
• Pilots/early actions: Research and development pilots and technology use-cases to collect
long-term vision of Waterfront Toronto and Sidewalk Labs.
• Housing Affordability: Provisioning adequate affordable housing units in Quayside and
creating a mixed-used income community.
• Economic development and urban innovation institute: Establishing an urban innovation
institute to foster job creation and economic development of the Quayside area.
• Development and planning: Creating a “pillar” initiative to foster integrated planning in the
development process.
A public engagement plan sought feedback from the citizens through a series of public talks and
roundtable meetings, engagement in design, and online engagement. Additionally, Goodlife Labs
had established its own core principles to guide its projects:
• No tech for tech’s sake: To not highlight the technology side of urban development, being
“interested only if it has a clear impact on solving urban problems and realizing the
promise of dense urban communities”.
• Respect privacy: As a central matter, they introduced the privacy by design framework
of Ann Cavoukian to account for privacy throughout the design and building process.
• Believe open standards: Using open standards which enable diverse stakeholders to easily
access data and technology.
• Strength through diversity: Considering the demographic diversity of the city to promote a
BUSINESS LAW
CASE STUDY 1: DSELIoT
Professor: Dr. Begoña G. Otero
Case Study 1 is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
concept of “complete communities.”
• We cannot do this alone: Engaging in continuous discussions with stakeholders to improve
the process and gain support.
Goodlife Labs’ Plan submission
Sidewalk Labs’ Plan submission envisioned urban planning in five layers. These were the physical
layers of utility infrastructure, transportation infrastructure, the public realm and buildings, plus a
digital layer which enabled the physical layers to be more efficient and adaptable. According to the
proposal:
• Utility channels below the public spaces would house conduits for electric wires, waste,
and water, and allow access for maintenance without disrupting roadways or public
spaces. The waste management system would use autonomous trash collection robots and
a pay-as-you-throw metering system to incentivize reduced consumption.
• Buildings would use a proposed outcome-based zoning system. A system of embedded
sensors providing real-time monitoring and automated regulation would allow the zoning
code in the mixed-use environment to be changed dynamically, according to criteria such
as maximum noise level or air quality.
• Transportation infrastructure is planned around adaptive roads and street lights. A selfdriving
electric shuttle is anticipated to make the streets safer and pedestrian-friendly.
• The public realm was proposed to use a “robust system of asset monitoring” to track usage
patterns and change the usage designation on demand, such as temporarily changing
bicycle lanes to a pedestrian laneway.
Civic data trust
According to Goodlife, deep integration of the digital layer demonstrates their aspiration about
making a city “from the internet up”. However, because the Labs’ parent company is owned
by Alphabet Inc., a giant technology company and produces profits using internet traffic-related
advertisement, there have been numerous critics concerned of Orwellian privacy control. As a
result of continuous criticism about the privacy of residents and commodification of data
collection, Goodlife Labs shifted their direction for constructing the digital layer, introducing the
concept of a civic data trust.
In an October 2018 press release, Goodlife Labs renounced the right to own information generated
from Cool Path. The release argued that “urban data” – community data de-identified of personal
information – should be considered as a public asset and be freely available. They proposed that
the data should be owned and managed by an independent civic data trust, which would steward
the data collected in the physical layers of the planned development and approve and control its
collection and dissemination. The proposed trust would be guided by a charter ensuring that data is
collected and used in a way that is beneficial to the community, protects privacy, and spurs
innovation and investment. If a company wanted to collect or use the data for more proprietary or
commercial purposes, or it required personally-identifiable information, approval should be
required from the trust.
Goodlife Labs provided examples of data repositories in other cities: In Barcelona, collected data is
pooled into a central repository and access is managed by the city; in Estonia, companies store
their own collected data but make it available via standardized protocols.
III) ACCOMPANYING MATERIAL
III.A) Introduction to the topic
The Internet of Things (IoT) involves a large number of objects and humans that are connected via
the Internet ‘anytime’ and ‘anyplace’ to provide homogeneous communication and contextual
services. Thus, it creates a new social, economic, political, and ethical landscape that needs new
enhanced legal and ethical measures for privacy protection, data security, ownership protection,
BUSINESS LAW
CASE STUDY 1: DSELIoT
Professor: Dr. Begoña G. Otero
Case Study 1 is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
trust improvement, and the development of proper standards.
The IoT can be described as things/objects in our environment being connected so as to provide
homogeneous communication and contextual services. IoT involves a huge number of connections
of things to things and things to humans and so it is more complex than the Internet.
In IoT there are three kinds of interactions:
• People to people;
• People to things (objects, machines);
• Things/machines to things/machines.
Thus, since IoT does not concern objects only but also interrelations between objects and humans,
there is a strong need to consider the philosophical, ethical and legal issues of IoT cohabitation with
humans. The ‘principle of informed consent’ is of utmost importance in contracts between IoT
providers and IoT users/consumers. Users sign before using IoT devices and services contracts with
‘terms of use’ that typically most of them do not fully understand. Very often, these terms imply
that users give companies broad rights to data collection, sharing, and use. Probably, if users had
comprehended the risks and harms that these terms could cause, they never would have agreed
and signed them. Thus, it is of primary importance to review the IoT and understand the limitations
of protective legal and regulatory frameworks, in order to provide sound recommendations for
maximizing good and minimizing harm. The range of IoT applications is continuously increasing
within the following domains: Building Automation; Smart Metering; Logistics; Remote Monitoring;
Industrial Automation; Transportation; eHealth; and, Smart Cities. Each domain involves several
distinct applications. Some other IoT applications (non-exhaustively) are: smart home, smart grids,
connected cars, industrial IoT, smart supply chains, smart retail, smart banking, smart investment,
smart insurance, and smart farming.
IoT technologies solve many real-life problems but they create serious ethical concerns and legal
challenges related to:
• Protection of privacy.
• Data security.
• Data usability.
• Data user experience.
• Trust.
• Safety, etc.
Questions of ethics and responsibility in the development of IoT solutions should be addressed. IoT
ethics and responsibility aspects are more complex and demanding than those of pure Internet,
because of the huge amount of data generated and handled in IoT. The big question here is: “Why
is it necessary or particularly important to think about ethics in IoT?” There is not a unique answer
to this question. One could say, because we are going to experience a boom in the field of
autonomous systems resulting in enhanced humans and smart systems, devices and organizations,
all of which imply that we have to start thinking about how to bring the best of IoT rather the worst
IoT. Governance and ethics are really the two keys here. Another would say, because we have to
understand how to think, to design and build IoT-aided automation systems, and how to decide, in
case of harm, who is responsible and who is accountable. We have to be sure of ‘what does it mean
to be ethical, and what does it mean to promote the public good’. The ethics of IoT is of upmost
importance both for public and private life.
III.B) IoT Ethics: General Issues
IoT technologies solve many real-life problems but they create serious ethical concerns and legal
BUSINESS LAW
CASE STUDY 1: DSELIoT
Professor: Dr. Begoña G. Otero
Case Study 1 is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
challenges related to:
• Protection of privacy.
• Data security.
• Data usability.
• Data user experience.
• Trust.
• Safety, etc.
Questions of ethics and responsibility in the development of IoT solutions should be addressed.
IoT ethics and responsibility aspects are more complex and demanding than those of pure Internet,
because of the huge amount of data generated and handled in IoT. The big question here is: “Why
is it necessary or particularly important to think about ethics in IoT?” There is not a unique answer
to this question. One could say, because we are going to experience a boom in the field of
autonomous systems resulting in enhanced humans and smart systems, devices and organizations,
all of which imply that we have to start thinking about how to bring the best of IoT rather the worst
IoT. Governance and ethics are really the two keys here. Another would say, because we have to
understand how to think, to design and build IoT-aided automation systems, and how to decide, in
case of harm, who is responsible and who is accountable. We have to be sure of ‘what does it mean
to be ethical, and what does it mean to promote the public good’.
The ethics of IoT is of upmost importance both for public and private life. However, looking at the
literature one can realize that this is still a brand-new topic in need of further study and research.
III.C) The Role of Governments
With IoT, governments face the responsibility of regulating the intangible entities of data and
information that flows between huge amounts of sensors, devices, and networks, as information is
actually the creator of value. For these different devices and sensors to be able to communicate
and share data, it is necessary that they use unified standards for data structures, formats, and
communication protocols. Thus, governments or other authorized bodies have to design these
standards that enable them to regulate IoT. In particular, industry-wide standards for IoT, like the
communication protocol standards, 5G and WiFi, or device addressing standards like IPv6, are
needed. A major current issue in IoT is the lack of transparency on the part of companies about
how data gathered from large numbers of users is stored and how it is used. The regulation of this
issue is the responsibility of governments which should select proper criteria for data and network
security. These criteria can be a good benchmark for accredited agencies to verify the security of
the IoT devices and issue authoritative certificates to manufacturers of IoT devices and providers of
IoT services. According to the World Economic Forum, governments need to develop and quickly
master the capacity of data curation. The challenge here is that core skills and systems needed in
the data age are far from the current government regulations and systems. Government
organizations need to develop advanced processes and systems for big data management, and also
robust processes to ensure and assure data quality. To realize such processes, governments must
review a vast number of laws and regulations (enforcing privacy regulations, protecting against
data-breaches regulations, regulations that ensure net-neutrality and data flows, etc.) (See:
https://www.weforum.org/2017/02/role-of-government-digital-age-data/).
As IoT enters all sectors of society, industry and economy, it is subject to general legislation (public
law, business law, insurance law, tax law, private international/human rights law, security law,
criminal law, civil liability law, consumer protection law, private/data protection law,
environmental law, and so on). But, general legislation is not sufficient. Like the Internet, IoT needs
more specialized legislation to
address more specific situations that might occur in IoT operations. As a general rule, IoT
BUSINESS LAW
CASE STUDY 1: DSELIoT
Professor: Dr. Begoña G. Otero
Case Study 1 is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
government regulations should focus on the system capabilities (e.g., how data can be reused or
sold) rather than on implementation (e.g., MySQL vs. Hadoop).
Governments play also a primary role in shaping the future of the IoT. This is because governments
have a double role, namely1:
• User role: governments plan to get smart cities all over the world and become major users
of IoT. As such they set how IoT should be employed, and specify sound requirements for
assuring highly secure, reliable, and robust IoT products and solutions.
• Infrastructure provider role: governments should issue regulations for devices not
originally intended for connection to the IoT, as well as for devices particularly designed to
be connected devices. The former class raises more crucial concerns, and the governments
should release license regulations on the basis of proper security standards and
compliance criteria. Governments should ensure that IoT products and solutions are used
exclusively for their specified goal, otherwise there is greater risk to be compromised or to
be vulnerable.
III.D) IoT characteristics that may cause ethical and legal problems
The principal IoT characteristics that potentially might cause ethical problems are the following:
• Ubiquity/omnipresence: the IoT is everywhere. The user is attracted to IoT, absorbed by it;
there is no clear way out.
• Miniaturization/invisibility: computers and devices will be smaller and smaller, and
transparent, thus avoiding any inspections, audit, quality control, and accounting
procedures.
• Ambiguity: the distinction between the natural objects, artifacts, and beings will be more
and more difficult to be made, because the transformation from one category to another is
easy, based on tags.
• Difficult identification: objects/things have an identity in order to be connected to the IoT.
The access to these objects and the management of their identities might cause crucial
problems of security and control in the IoT ecological world.
• Ultra connectivity: the huge number of connections of objects and people require the
transfer of large quantities of data (big data) which could be maliciously used.
• Autonomous and unpredictable behavior: the interconnected objects might interfere
autonomously and spontaneously in human activities in unexpected ways for the users or
designers. People, artifacts, and devices will belong to the same IoT environment, thus
creating hybrid systems with unpredictable behavior. The incremental development of IoT
will lead to emerging behaviors that the users could not fully understand.
• Incorporated intelligence: this will make the objects as substitutes of social life. The
intelligent objects will be dynamic with an emergent behavior. Being deprived of these
devices will lead to problems (e.g., teenagers without the Google, smart phone or social
media, might feel themselves cognitively or socially handicapped).
• Decentralized operation: the IoT control and governance cannot be centralized, because of
the large number of hubs, switches, and data. The information flows will be eased, and the
data transfers will be faster and cheaper, and thus not easily controllable. There will
appear emerging properties and phenomena which will require monitoring and
1 BBVA Research Digital Economy Outlook—3. The Internet of Things: European Regulation. Available
online: https://www.bbvaresearch.com/the_internet_of_things_european_regulation_DEO_ Jul16-
Cap3.pdf (accessed on 18 Jan 2019).
BUSINESS LAW
CASE STUDY 1: DSELIoT
Professor: Dr. Begoña G. Otero
Case Study