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In this article, we ask if and why people share personal data in a smart city environment. We consider such data sharing as a particular dimension of privacy behaviour, and we define a smart city as one monitored and managed by digital and data technologies.
Our research was conducted in the Netherlands in 2019, where many cities have embraced smart technologies but where no city as a whole qualifies as 'smart' (Pisani, 2015). Moreover, outside the circle of IT and data professionals or city civil servants, few Dutch people know what a smart city is, neither can they see it around them, as the constituting technologies are by and large invisible in the physical environment: cables are under the ground, Wi-Fi signals float through the air, and data are inconspicuously collected and stored (Caprotti, 2017, 2019; Van Zoonen & Hirzalla, 2018). There is, hence, no easily accessible, physical research site to observe privacy behaviour of citizens in the smart city and it is unlikely to find a large enough group of research participants who know what a smart city will be, to identify and reflect on such behaviour.
However, privacy behaviour is quickly becoming a salient issue in the further development of smart cities. Apart from compliance with privacy and administrative laws, it is crucial for municipalities, knowledge institutes, IT and data companies to understand and adapt to privacy behaviour and concerns of citizens, if they want to make a smart city that is beneficial to all of them and respects the public value of privacy. This is a widely held desire among smart city stakeholders as the many recent laws, charters and manifestos about ethical principles for the smart city demonstrate. Key among those documents and publications is an acknowledgment of privacy protection and citizen engagement as fundamental ingredients of a smart city (e.g., Cardullo, Di Feliciantonio & Kitchin, 2019; Greenfield, 2013; Kitchin, 2016; Morozov & Bria, 2018; Thomas et al., 2016). However, as Engelbert, Van Zoonen & Hirzalla (2019) argue, the main corporate and governmental actors frame digital and data technologies mainly as operational solutions to urban challenges. This withholds an acknowledgment of the wider societal issues at stake and the need for public debate about the democratic legitimacy of smart city development.
In this context of invisible technologies and the absence of public debate, the challenge for research is to represent the smart city in a way that speaks to research participants and elicits realistic privacy behaviour. To that end we designed a gamified and richly illustrated survey in which participants move through a virtual urban environment where they have to fulfil data-knowledge assignments, make behavioural decisions and answer value questions about privacy. Along the way they receive awards for finalizing tasks. We developed the gamified survey for two purposes: to examine, by proxy of the virtual representation, privacy behaviour in the smart city, and to raise awareness and conversation among members of the Dutch public (about which we reported in Rijshouwer, Leclercq & Van Zoonen 2022). The choices and actions of game players were registered automatically and transformed into a standard data matrix for analysis. It is this empirical data on which this article is based.
Before we discuss more details of game design, variable construction and analysis, we briefly review the literature about privacy behaviour and smart cities which informed the conceptual underpinnings of this research and the design of the survey game.