Sofia Laborde – Privacy in the Smart City: What’s the Problem? : Privacy Issues in the Real-World Development of a Smart City: The Case of Dijon

The rise of smart cities reveals a fundamental tension between the promise of integrating urban data and the need to compartmentalize it, particularly when services rely on the use of personal information. Smart city policies promote the seamless, cross-cutting flow of data within integrated infrastructures, while a range of regulations—notably the French Data Protection Act (1978), supplemented by the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR, 2018)—strictly define the conditions for the collection, use, and retention of information. In this study, we demonstrate that, far beyond a simple dichotomy between technological visions and legal norms, the challenges related to the production, circulation, use, and protection of data that may affect individuals’ privacy actively shape the materiality of projects, technical architectures, governance frameworks, and the ways in which residents appropriate them. The core of this study is based on an empirical corpus collected in Dijon (France) between January 2019 and February 2022. It draws on ethnographic observations in public spaces, participant observation in working meetings, individual and group interviews with project stakeholders, as well as a questionnaire on digital technology, the smart city, and privacy. Drawing on the case of Dijon (Chapter 1), this study analyzes how privacy is distributed, expressed, and embodied throughout the design, deployment, and maintenance of a smart city. At first glance, from a management perspective, privacy appears to be a non-issue (Chapter 2): it is rarely discussed politically, is often presented as being under control from the design phase onward, is seldom prioritized by technical operators, and is almost entirely absent from citizens’ concerns. This lack of attention raises questions about the conditions under which privacy issues go unnoticed. The concept of “sociotechnical ambiguity” serves here as a heuristic tool, examined through five analytical lenses: by stages of the smart city project (Chapter 3), by thematic projects (Chapter 4), by actors (Chapter 5), by technical systems (Chapter 6), and by data (Chapter 7). With regard to residents (Chapter 8), we show that the smart city does not spark public controversy at the local level, as it remains discreet, integrated into an already dense digital daily life and barely perceptible in users’ experiences. When asked about their use of services they identify as part of the smart city, residents demonstrate a diffuse, context-specific, and rarely politicized engagement with these issues. In Dijon, privacy protection relies less on a unified framework than on the fragmented structure of the project’s activities themselves. We refer to this dynamic as the “paradox of fragmentation”: it can be interpreted both as an indicator of the inefficiency of integrated data management and as a factor limiting the flow of personal data. While this fragmentation protects individuals and ensures controlled use of smart city data, it simultaneously limits the expected benefits of digital integration. Similar configurations and dynamics emerge in other contexts (Chapter 9). As part of the field of Science and Technology Studies (STS), this work demonstrates that privacy is a discrete yet structuring factor—on legal, political, organizational, and technological levels—in the implementation and adoption of smart cities.

Composition du jury :

• Corinne Delmas, University Professor, Gustave Eiffel University – LATTS (Chair of the Selection Committee)
• Florence Millerand, University Professor, Université du Québec à Montréal (Rapporteur)
• Gérald Gaglio, University Professor, Université Côte d’Azur (Rapporteur)
• Alexandre Mathieu-Fritz, University Professor, Université Gustave Eiffel (Thesis Advisor)
• Éric Dagiral, Associate Professor, Université Paris Cité (Examiner)
• Antoine Courmont, Associate Professor, Université Gustave Eiffel – LATTS (Examiner)
• Cécile Caron, Research Engineer in Sociology, GRETS–SEQUOIA, EDF R&D (Invited Member)