The Watched City: Privacy, Surveillance, and the Governance of Smart Urban Mobility

Abstract

Smart mobility systems increasingly depend on continuous data collection from fare media, mobile devices, cameras, connected vehicles, license-plate systems, shared-mobility platforms, and urban sensors. These infrastructures can improve network management, safety, reliability, and traveler information, yet they also convert ordinary movement into a persistent stream of potentially identifiable behavioral data. This article develops a planning-centered framework for governing the privacy and surveillance risks of smart urban mobility. Drawing on scholarship on smart urbanism, transport data protection, public-sector technology governance, and recent work on video-based traffic sensing and data sovereignty, the article compares governance logics visible in European, North American, and Asian smart-city contexts. It argues that privacy cannot be treated as a downstream legal compliance issue. Instead, privacy protection must be embedded in transportation planning decisions about purpose, data architecture, procurement, retention, access, sharing, and public accountability. The article proposes a Responsible Smart Mobility Governance Framework organized around necessity, proportionality, minimization, transparency, contestability, security, equity, and institutional stewardship. The framework reframes the smart-city question from whether cities can collect mobility data to what data are legitimately necessary for a defined public purpose and under what governance conditions. smart cities; smart mobility; privacy; surveillance; urban data; transportation planning; data governance.