In Kansas City you trade your data for Wi-Fi

[Commentary] I’ve long wondered what it takes to make a city “smart.” The tech world tosses around the phrase “smart city” to encompass a wide variety of projects, from sensors in lights to track gunfire to putting Wi-Fi on municipal transportation. Kansas City (MO) is the latest to try to create a smart city. The municipality, famous for its barbecue and for being the first stop for Google Fiber, has created a Wi-Fi connected corridor that stretches for 2.2-miles along one of its streetcar lines.

Kansas City’s Chief Innovation Officer, Bob Bennett, said that the smart city effort started with Wi-Fi and now encompasses informational kiosks that can offer directions and local information, streetlights that dynamically change based on the time of day and the number of people around, and stoplights that can be remotely controlled to improve the flow of traffic. When asked how he defines a smart city, Bennett was practical. “A smart city is the ability to interact with and be proactive for our citizens through the use of data,” he says. To him, the core feature that helped turn KC into a smart city is the Wi-Fi network. Everything else stems from there. It also is the reason that local citizens embraced the project, despite the fact that it is collecting a lot of data on them. So when walking the streets of Kansas City know that when you are logging onto the local Wi-Fi, or merely pinging it if your phone’s Wi-Fi network is turned on, you’re helping support some really cool municipal services such as being able to dim streetlights if no one is around. You are also sharing some of your data with a marketing firm and potentially other providers. Is this the tradeoff to make cities smart?

[Stacey Higginbotham is a technology writer based in Austin (TX)]