Felix Morsbach

So over the past few years, we've been doing a bit of research in the area of privacy and smart cities.

And what we mean by that is that in whatever we envision our future cities to look like, one thing is for certain that there will be a lot more technology in it.

then let it be traffic monitoring to suggest you the best route dynamically, or also just being about, let's say, occupancy tracking in a train to tell me which carriage I should board in on a train ride to not be crowded in the train.

And if we want to do that, there's one easy way to do this.

If we put video cameras everywhere and we can do all these calculations by applying some fancy models, doing some AI stuff, or whatever you think.

But it would require...

video cameras.

And rightfully so, a lot of people don't think that this is a good idea because it would create a lot of privacy tension in our cities and we might want to be mostly anonymous if we walk through our cities.

So at least for Germany, I would say yes.

We see it like to a decent amount.

So for example, a few years ago here in Karlsruhe, the city where I live and work, we had the scenario that they wanted to place video cameras on one of our hotspots in the city to have like early response times for emergency services and law enforcement if there's like a fight breaking out or whatever.

And there was a huge protest from civil rights organizations and also the population.

They said, yeah, but we don't want to be surveilled during the day.

We don't want to be put under principal investigation all the time.

Which led to a lot of discussion about, could we achieve the same kind of utility?

We would call it a utility.

Everybody wants to have fast emergency response time.

No one talks about that.

No one argues against that.

But do we really need to have video cameras for that?