The Safe Way to Build a Smart City

You don’t have to dig deep to find out what can go wrong with open data initiatives. Just look back to 2014, when the New York City Taxi and Limousine Commission released hundreds of millions of records on taxi trips in the city, with data anonymized to protect identifiable details—at least in theory. In reality, the data was recorded in a format that allowed a software engineer to re-identify the license numbers of the taxis and drivers. A Gawker journalist then linked this to celebrities taking cab rides across the city months after the initial release, speculating on the routes they had taken and even how much they tipped.

It’s certainly not the most sensitive data to ever be leaked or hacked, but it is an important illustration of the risks cities face in releasing data from their many constituent agencies; the implications aren’t always apparent until long after the information is out in the public domain.