How Do People View Various Kinds of Smart City Services? Focus on the Acquisition of Personal Information

Abstract

In smart city services, large volumes of personal information are generally captured, and urban development is based on that data. However, people do not always have accepting attitudes toward smart city services. The purpose of this study was to identify the expectations and anxieties that people have toward five typical services in smart cities (social credit, artificial intelligence (AI) cameras, health information, garbage collection, and automatic vehicles) by using mainly open-ended questions. An online survey was conducted with Japanese participants by presenting them with one of the five vignettes about the services described above. The results showed that the participants’ expectations from each service were distinctly different between the vignettes. Anxieties about the leakage of personal information were found for the vignettes of social credit and health information. For the vignettes of AI cameras and garbage collection, anxieties that privacy would not be sufficiently ensured and that people would be involved in a surveillance society were noted. Additionally, the participants tended to exhibit lower accepting attitudes toward services considered to capture a large amount of personal information. We believe that our findings are meaningful to operators leading smart city projects and researchers in urban planning and psychology.