[9712263]

To be honest, I don't quite understand what smart city even means. This term is so board and include so much different aspect of life that I am not sure what it includes. It is a cool marketing term, but does not explain too much what is happening.

So, I have read some of the use cases. One of them is putting a sensor in a garbage bin, so that the sensor could take picture of the garbage and determine where they should go. I don't think this is smart. Japan has already been very efficient on garbage collection, because Japanese people just separate different type of garbage themselves, and fine people who don't. A policy could just fix this in a cost effective way, not some sensor. But the spirit here is placing a camera to see what it could do.

Some other project like improving the accuracy of water meter to detect water usage and pinpoint leaks. They admit it already exists, and only improvement is required.

I could conclude that it is a debate about who could put an IoT or sensor in the public area. Google just wants to place those IoT in the city to see what they could do with it. Basically a web crawler in physical world. The government may also want to create a hype so that people would approve infrastructure funding to improve existing infrastructure people don't think it's that smart.

Am I missing something here?

[gotocake]

I just assumed it would be a more Orwellian version of the old “Company Towns.” In addition it would be a big laboratory to test what people will accept and how much personal information can be gleaned from those sensors and related analysis.