Digital Citizens in a Smart City: The Impact and Security Challenges of IoT on citizen’s Data Privacy

Cities are investing in smart technologies to improve efficiency, resilience against cyber attacks and quality of life for their residents. They provide enhanced services and can largely benefit the environment too. However, there are a variety of security implications during the transition towards a smart city. For example, anticipated risks have an impact on the citizens’ safety, privacy and access to critical national infrastructure. Therefore, smart technologies must be carefully planned to maintain efficiency, security and overall desirability. We follow a holistic approach to review these risks with a proposed CyberSmart framework focusing on four domains namely Cybersecurity risk, Cyber Resilience, Data protection and privacy, and Governance (CRPG). The discussion is formed around data privacy alongside strategic solutions to address related aspects such as the management of operational risk, key stakeholder complexity, and lack of trust in new devices. The proposed framework helps to identify and build mitigating actions to support incident response planning with a focus on prevention and management. It also demonstrates the importance of collaboration to address resilience at a strategic level.