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Residents in large cities expected to give up data

960 640 Jack Wynn

50% of citizens in big cities are predicted to share their personal data to benefit from ‘smart cities’ by 2019.

Analysts at Gartner believe the ‘hyperconnectivity’ of a smart city will mean residents will voluntarily give up information to benefit from government and commercial collaboration.

Data sharing is already constantly happening on a small scale, but it is expected to accelerate and expand due to demand for efficiency and convenience.

Many are already sharing their details with VPAs, or virtual personal assistants, who simplify the process by filling out long forms and paperwork for you.

Governments are already beginning to adapt to the change, and are expected to generate revenue from open data, with 20% of local government organisations expected to benefit from this by 2020.

“Open data portals in cities are not a new thing, but many portals today have limited machine readability and therefore limited business value,” said Gartner research vice president, Bettina Tratz-Ryan, “the city becomes ‘smart’ when the data is collected and governed in a way that can produce valuable real-time streams, rather than just backward-looking statistics or reports.”

Some cities have already begun to make changes to their interface. The Copenhagen Data Exchange is already making moves to connect citizen data, but the process isn’t yet real-time.

The most important part, according to Gartner, is to remodel the data to generate profit. The key to monetisation will be to create an automated and streamlined service in order to organise patterns.

“Users will have a number of options to ‘pay’ for data access depending on the use case,” said Ms. Tratz-Ryan. “A normal citizen may simply participate via data democracy and have free access in return for providing their own data, whereas commercial use may require sharing revenue with the data owner, or buying a license to access an enriched data source.”