I interviewed once at a company helping to build "smart cities" in India and in Malaysia. The idea sounded really cool, and I'd love to do statistics for something other than making people buy stuff online.
They actually just wanted a white guy with a Ph.D. to schmooze with clients, and were willing to pay 8 lac/month for it. It was unclear what "smart city" meant to them - the best I could tell it was just spinning up a hadoop cluster to big data the traffic light control systems. (Smart traffic light controls already exist and run perfectly fine on a laptop.)
There is some uncertainty about what the concept means to some people still, but basically it's an Orwellian Neoliberals dream.
AFAICT the idea is that Smart Cities wire up as much as they can to central decision making capabilities - this would include human intelligence about the residents living in the city including how happy they are, how much waste they produce, electricity they consume, where they go to collect mass traffic patterns, etc.
The idea here is that the cities will be able to response to emergencies and opportunities better because they can act as one city immediately. Smart cities presumably can capture individual innovation, but also collective data for collective decision making, and machine/computer information.
The difficulty here lies in the fact that it is supposed to then be owned and operated by private individuals. There is not really a mention of a vote - smart cities are independent of governance structure. The pitfall is that modern senses of the importance of 'efficiency' may lure some into thinking that having the intelligence/data and a well greased economy are enough to understand the underlying population's preferences (on the whole, behavioral economics has proven this false).
That's not to say getting some real and real-time data about an entire city isn't an exciting prospect.
Maximize tax/fee revenue while minimizing operating expenses to reduce the standard of living of all residents as low as possible in an individualized detailed manner just barely above rebellion or property abandonment, at least in practice. Then sell it to the rubes as being a social or cultural change where you can ignore all the tech its going to be the first city on the planet where human nature took a day off and we'll all live together in perfect peace and harmony. Sell the financial benefits "rich get richer" and all that to the leaders, sell a line of BS about human nature changing to the rubes. Its basically an atheist cult in the sense that it operates as a traditional cult WRT somewhat extreme exploitation of the participants, but subtract the higher metaphysical beings marketing message that cults have, or insert big data / big government itself as the higher metaphysical being.
Its like the dichotomy of internet of things. What you ship is a fridge where corporate sends a special packet to make the compressor burn out when quarterly sales are below their target while selling all formerly private personal data gathered to every corporation on the planet for whatever you can get. What you sell to the rubes is fuzzy bunnies of the corporation caring about your organic nutritional needs by ordering orange juice from peapod automatically when it detects a low level or monitoring for expired food or the "wrong" beverages stored inside.
The similarity is the message has nothing to do with the purpose or operation, at a level of dissonance never before seen on the consumer markets.
If it were anything like what you describe, I'd probably have given a lot more consideration to joining. Your proposed policy is likely to be superior to democracy - democracies like Detroit can't even maintain standard of living high enough to avoid abandonment. Plus you can avoid a lot of rent seeking - if consumer surplus can be created by a massive increase in housing (ala SF, Mumbai), locals don't get to vote for rent seeking policies.
In reality they didn't have anything remotely so coherent. It was just a variant of "lets hadoop all 200mb of our big data into the NoSQL for business intelligence insights".
one of the prime reasons gnu forked firefox for icecat was google safebrowsing , besides that i dont think firefox really doesnt give a shit about your privacy and shit like that .
their primary concern is to ship software , not code quality or issues of relevance to users .if the illusion can be maintained that it does care about your privacy then it works fine for them , it works fine for their major "donors".
