Dubai and Barcelona as Smart Cities: Some Reflections on Data Protection Law and Privacy

This study introduces a descriptive analysis to carry out the transformation of the Dubai smart city as a case study in the GCC region with reference to the Barcelona smart city. Furthermore, to investigate how the Dubai smart city will deal with the huge amount of the collected personal data through Internet of Things devices and applications. The theoretical analysis shows that the Barcelona smart city can be represented as an effective model, its innovations recommends to be used in Dubai smart city. The analysis founds that the classification of the collected data inside smart city to open and shared data did not provide sufficient privacy for personal data. Therefore, the personal data should be classified explicitly in order to be processed separately under the rules of the data protection law.