LettersTime for Hong Kong to go from ‘Asia’s world city’ to world’s smart city

Name: Hong Kong’s dead and dying trees given a second life
Uploaded: 2021-07-11T22:40:08.000Z
Duration: 3 min 31 s
Description: Hong Kong’s dead and dying trees given a second life

While people are wary about sharing data with the government, they seem less concerned when divulging all to private companies

Misplaced concerns about data privacy mean Hong Kong misses out on benefits of smart solutions, such as to environmental challenges

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People look at their mobile phones at the Tsim Sha Tsui harbourfront on April 5. Photo: Sun Yeung

Letters

Published: 6:40am, 12 Jul 2021Updated: 6:40am, 12 Jul 2021

I refer to your poll question of July 4: “How can officials ensure better communication over the public benefits of technology?”

“It is the unknown we fear...”, wrote J.K. Rowling. This aptly describes the paranoia over privacy concerns because of a collective unfamiliarity with what the terms “data privacy” and “smart city” mean.

Data privacy involves data collection only for the purpose it is meant for, secure storage, not sharing without consent, and purging anonymously after it is not required. It is governed by Personal Data (Privacy) Ordinance, one of Asia’s oldest regulations on data privacy. This ordinance shares common features with European privacy regulations like General Data Privacy Regulation.

The concept of a “smart city” is civic governance by deploying technology to collect big data and derive insights that will act as inputs for policymaking. There are some distinct benefits: for example, a 2018 McKinsey Global Institute report showed that smart cities produce less waste. Isn’t this one of the problems that Hong Kong is facing? There is a catastrophic waste management crisis with poor recycling rates and the city is running out of landfills.

Smart solutions like QR coding rubbish bins to weigh them and charging households that generate more than optimum thresholds, using the Internet of Things to track garbage movement from collection to disposal or recycling, are some effective measures to use real-time data for waste management.

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Hong Kong’s dead and dying trees given a second life

Policymakers have been slammed for not considering on-the-ground scenarios when they have unsuccessfully tried to solve these problems, and rightly so. This is because most such initiatives, like waste recycling plants that are running below capacity or the proposal to incentivise waste collection, have not delivered what they were intended to.