Average citizens may be the greatest liability to smart cities

Smart cities without strong cybersecurity can leave utilities extremely vulnerable

Insecure devices connected to the Internet of Things pose risks to the entire network, which cybercriminals can hijack to compromise infrastructure and private resident data. Poorly secured systems that become inoperable can undermine the promise of smart cities by worsening the quality of life.

Are smart cities a dumb idea?

Smart cities require vast troves of data to run, making their systems attractive to hackers. Listen to this one hour podcast to learn about the risks and what is being done to mitigate them.

As of 2025, there are no federal laws involving privacy and smart city technologies

Advancements in cloud technology and artificial intelligence allow cities to capture, store, and analyze more information than ever before. Experts warn that the unhindered ability to collect and use this data may infringe on residents' rights and endanger them if the data gets into the hands of malicious parties.

Artificial intelligence may further enhance smart city data analysis

Identifying patterns within systems in the Internet of Things may enable AI tools to make informed decisions regarding transportation, safety, and sustainability without human intervention. However, such tools will also need to successfully address concerns about privacy, digital equity, and algorithmic bias.

Many issues facing urban environments cannot be solved by smart technologies

Although connecting systems to the Internet of Things can provide improved efficiency in municipal systems, problems such as limited affordable housing are driven by larger socioeconomic factors. Some experts suggest that local governments should focus resources on practical solutions to these issues rather than investing in smart technologies.

Read a book making the case for 'smart enough' cities

University of Michigan professor Ben Green argues that cities should be enhanced by technology rather than driven by it, thereby preventing injustice and inequality beneath their surface. By embracing social change in conjunction with smart technologies, residents, Green suggests, can avoid valuing such technologies as ends in themselves.

AI may enable smart cities to drastically improve public safety

By utilizing machine learning techniques to analyze real-time monitoring reports against facial recognition databases, artificial intelligence can enhance the identification of criminals and coordinate an appropriate emergency response across various scenarios.

Smart city systems can increase positive feelings toward local government

A 2018 study analyzed 50 global cities to determine whether smart city technologies enhance residents' quality of life. It found that these technologies can decrease the time spent interacting with healthcare and government by 45% to 65%, while also decreasing the disease burden by 8% to 15%.

Connected technology improves infrastructure efficiency in smart cities

Through information and communication technologies, smart cities can provide enhanced public services and improved quality of life by managing traffic and dynamic safety policies. They can also promote sustainability by automating energy use and redirecting resources according to need.

Smart cities have been more successful when upgrading existing infrastructure

Building urban landscapes with smart technologies from scratch has sometimes produced futuristic-looking yet sterile environments that struggle to attract residents and justify high costs. Enhancing existing areas while retaining their historical and cultural touchstones has proven more appealing in many cities.

Smart cities support interdepartmental goals by facilitating shared infrastructure

Instead of working in isolation, municipal departments can share data, such as lighting and telecom needs, seamlessly and collaborate to solve larger-scale problems together. Integrating public feedback systems can further improve city services and sustainability.

The benefits and risks of smart grids, from improved efficiency to cybersecurity risks

By using a network of devices, including digital meters, sensors, and controllers, smart grids can quickly detect mechanical issues and fluctuations in supply and demand, automatically adjusting electricity flow to prevent cascading failures. While this is important for variable solar and wind power generation, many of these computer systems are designed to be controlled remotely, which increases the risk of malicious access.

What is a smart city?

The internet of things and automation are two of the technologies used in smart cities. Learn about the technologies making cities more human-centric in this three-minute read.

Evaluating the world’s 'smartest' cities

A ranking of "smart cities" analyzes cities by economical and technological aspects as well as quality of life, inclusiveness, and care to the environment.

Will smart cities widen the divide between rich and poor?

Author of the book "Uneven Innovation" talks about the need for intention when planning smart cities to avoid unintentionally creating inequality. This hour-long podcast delves into the impact of privatizing public services, community engagement,...

Dubai and Barcelona are examples of smart cities

By integrating technology into public transit, utilities, and other municipal systems, these cities aim to reduce costs and enhance the quality of life for their residents. Some of these technologies include adaptive lighting, parking sensors, and underground waste systems.

Chinese citizens express both support and frustration toward smart city surveillance

Although surveillance is viewed as necessary for enhancing morality and enforcing regulations, many citizens adopt mental tactics to distance themselves from it. Surveillance is linked to China's historical "century of humiliation," following the Opium Wars and Japanese invasion.

What its like to live in the world’s ‘smartest cities’

What’s it like to live in a smart city? The BBC interviewed residents of five of the world’s smartest, as determined by the International Institute for Management Development, to find out. (See previous resource for those rankings.) Common praises included ease of transportation, sustainability initiatives and proximity to nature.

Explore a worldwide ranking of smart cities

This interactive site evaluates residents' perceptions of the infrastructure and technologies available to them across 146 cities to produce a ranking based on a Smart City Index. Users can utilize the City Comparison feature to compare their city with others around the world.

Singapore, one of the world's smartest cities

A fascinating look into what makes Singapore one of the smartest cities in the world, including human-centric innovations benefitting human health such as the AI-powered "Smart Elderly Alert System."

In 1974, Los Angeles’s Community Analysis Bureau built a smart city

Los Angeles utilized aerial imaging and cluster analysis to gather and interpret civic data, leveraging surveillance technologies developed by the Department of Defense during the height of the Cold War. Instead of being used for military purposes, data insights helped direct social services to high-poverty neighborhoods.

Digital twins create real-time 3D models of smart cities

These re-creations allow city planners to track changes and manage infrastructure more easily by testing strategies in virtual environments. Geospatial technologies, such as mobile mapping and satellite imaging, help cities assess urban layouts, plan for disasters, and manage resources more efficiently.

As occurred during the 2026 hack of an AI platform by OpenAI, agentic AI may exploit a system vulnerability to access sensitive data if that information enables it to complete its assigned task.

The security and privacy risks of augmented reality

One of the most serious perceived risks of augmented reality is the loss of privacy. Because AR technology can see what users are doing, user privacy is jeopardized. AR collects far more information about who users are and what they are doing than...

Listen to tech company Palantir's CEO Alex Karp discuss the threat of a surveillance state.

Explore the components of autonomous vehicles controls

A suite of cutting-edge hardware and computation-intensive software creates the potential for self-driving cars to be safer, more fuel-efficient, and more accessible to a broader range of drivers. However, automation also introduces potential cybersecurity threats.

EXTREMA is a smart city system protecting residents from heat-related health risks

The mobile application is designed to protect citizens in select European cities from extreme temperatures by calculating the heat index at a specific location and providing personalized information to users. Municipal governments can also utilize it to inform emergency responses, such as determining when and where to open cooling centers.

Unlike the models made by large AI companies, open-weight models can have their safeguards removed or weakened, a process that has become increasingly easy and may expose users to harmful information.

Explore plans for smart cities expected to be built by 2050

Locations such as Net City in China, Woven City in Japan, and NEOM in Saudi Arabia are expected to incorporate green energy, AI, and advanced transportation system technologies to enhance air quality, reduce congestion, and minimize pollution by significantly reducing personal car use.

Smart cities like Songdo, South Korea, have created isolating environments

Built as a futuristic, eco-friendly city filled with smart features like pneumatic trash systems and app-controlled homes, the town provides limited opportunities for face-to-face interactions amid sterile backdrops. A focus on high-rise housing amplifies the lonely, disconnected atmosphere.

Modernizing health data privacy: A call for comprehensive reform

Despite the advancements in medical technology and data collection, securing personal health data remains a pressing issue in the 21st century. This Forbes article analyzes the state of health data privacy, sheds light on the current shortcomings,...

Through prompt injection attacks, bad actors provide deceptive prompts to generative AI systems in order to manipulate their outputs and acquire sensitive data.

How to prevent a worst-case scenario with synbio

Author and entrepreneur Rob Reid reviews the risks of a world where more and more people have access to the technology needed to create a doomsday bug that could wipe out humanity.

In a 2024 survey, 93% of participants expressed concerns about self-driving cars

Safety was the leading consumer fear, with technological malfunctions coming in second. Nearly half of all consumers identified skepticism or concern as their primary descriptor for autonomous cars, but 20% cited enhanced mobility for the elderly and people with disabilities as a key benefit.

Minor technology failures can spiral into massive internet outages

A mix of centralized cloud infrastructure and legacy protocols leaves the internet susceptible to downtime from minor cyberattacks or software bugs, infrastructure damage caused by extreme weather, and human error if a DNS service provider—the internet's phone book—or a backend system, such as Amazon Web Services, were compromised.

Autonomous vehicles have been confirmed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions

Research indicates that self-driving cars can reduce harmful pollution through lower traffic, decreased parking demand, and optimized driving behavior. These benefits can be enhanced further in smart cities with responsive traffic signals.

Anthropic's Frontier Red Team assesses the dangers of its AI tools through 'evals'—safety tests that probe models to disclose sensitive information.

The dark web can expose anonymous users to potentially dangerous environments

Browsing the dark web requires onion routing, which prevents visitors from being identified and the locations from which they connect from being traced. This has been useful to activists in environments affected by political oppression or instability. However, those unfamiliar with navigating the space may encounter malware and network attacks from denizen hackers.

Future self-driving cars may communicate across a closed wireless infrastructure

Current autonomous vehicles collect and analyze their own data through their own hardware and proprietary software. Connecting data from all such cars on a single network will require overcoming challenges related to standardization and security.

Data privacy advocates worry that Google collects too much personal information

Politicians have also criticized whether the search engine exerts too much control over gatekeeping online information and influencing what is considered fact or fiction, deviating from its original corporate motto of "don't be evil."

Social media platforms benefit not just from ensuring they have satisfied users, but also from the personal data they scoop up and can then sell to online advertisers.

Explaining how open source systems like Linux can be secure, despite their public source code

While no computer system is immune to all cyberattacks and malware, the transparency of open-source technology means many thousands of developers can review and oversee the underlying code powering the software on an ongoing basis. This increases the likelihood of catching and patching vulnerabilities more quickly than smaller groups of cybercriminals looking to exploit them.

Experiments involving AI agents operating in virtual societies for 15 days produced diverse outcomes, ranging from every agent dying to the creation of a functioning democracy, depending on the AI model used.

Americans think being informed is a priority for voting, but don't prioritize reading the news.

The 'Strong Towns' podcast explores how American cities can become financially resilient

This weekly podcast examines why the way America has built its cities since World War II has left some communities financially fragile—and what local governments can do differently moving forward.

AI experts argue that artificial intelligence could annihilate humanity in two primary ways: Humans weaponizing extremely powerful AI, or humans losing control of it.

Tech giants like SpaceX and Meta are increasingly behaving like sovereign powers

Companies now make unilateral decisions once reserved for nation-states, such as controlling satellite internet access in active war zones and influencing global information flows. Lawmakers and the international order are struggling to keep up with technological developments, let alone regulate them.

Privacy concerns in the credit scoring system

Because credit scores use a lot of personal information (such as whether or not someone makes credit card payments on time), some worry their privacy is being compromised in the data collection process.

Technical vulnerabilities prevent full-proof anonymity when browsing the dark web

Despite encrypting data and relaying it within the Tor network, traffic between the network exit and the final destination is no longer hidden and can be captured. Law enforcement agencies can also attempt to deanonymize users by monitoring and matching data signal patterns entering and leaving the network via a correlation algorithm.

Visualizing the consequence of data breaches

To get a sense of the grim state of data security today, take a look at this infographic from TruthFinder that explains why 2018 was the year of the data breach tsunami.