Enhancing data sovereignty to improve intelligent mobility services in smart cities

Abstract

Smart cities aim to provide more digitalized, equitable, sustainable, and liveable cities. In smart cities data evolves as an important asset and citizens data in particular is being used to provide data-driven mobility services. Likewise, in smart cities data is produced and used by individuals having no ownership or control over these data thus affecting their security and privacy. Also, actors such as mobility service providers, companies, third parties, etc. often leverage individuals’ data without regarding users’ autonomy. Accordingly, data sovereignty which entails the possibility to govern and keep control over owned data is gaining widespread attention. As a result, stakeholders in the mobility sector need to share data whilst keeping control to manage data access and usage. Although, existing initiatives are promoting sovereign participation using a federated infrastructure. However, achieving an effective governance usage control and access mechanisms can be challenging especially in the transportation sector. It is thus imperative for individuals to have control, ownership, and custody over their data. This has necessitated the notions of data sovereignty. Therefore, this article employs a systematic review to examine how data sovereignty can be achieved for individuals when they use urban mobility services in smart cities by enabling the secure sharing of data by giving control of data over to individuals. Additionally, this article designs a data control scheme that can be applied to realize data sovereign mobility services. Evidence from this study provides technical and non-technical requirements needed in realizing data sovereignty in smart cities.