In 2015, the U.S. Department of Transportation launched The Smart City Challenge where it encouraged mid-population cities to focus "on the issues of future urban transportation (shared, connected, autonomous vehicles), aiming to obtain solutions to address upcoming challenges in a sustainable manner," (World Bank). The goal of developing San Francisco into a smart city is to help reduce pollution, provide more access for people with disabilities, increase safety, and provide low-income people with access to WiFi, smartphones, and affordable transportation. All of this sounds like a great idea and could be a great opportunity to solve a lot of current issues. The only problem with this is that San Francisco has had issues of bias, issues of isolating who has access to surveillance systems, and has been unclear about what types of technologies are included with this surveillance. In the article "'Smart' Cities Are Surveilled Cities" by Robert Muggah and Greg Walton, they talk about how San Francisco is one of the most surveilled cities in the US ever since the increase of cameras was implemented after 9/11. This is not necessarily a problem because it is for public safety, but it could become a problem when these cameras have "support for facial recognition," (Muggah and Walton). In response to this information coming out, San Francisco pledged to roll back some of the cameras used, but this has been proven to be difficult. According to Muggah and Walton, "digital rights advocates recently detected over 2,700 cameras still in use for police surveillance, property security, and transportation monitoring. In 2000, campaigners sued the city for tapping into private cameras to surveil mass protests, in defiance of the new ordinance," (Muggah and Walton).
The idea of a smart city and all of the benefits attached to it is undeniably great. The cities in Kenya have successfully implemented technology into their city exceptionally well and that is due to its pledge of ethics and fairness and focusing on circumstances and necessity. In San Francisco, most of the surveillance being used is by the police which in turn would be used for identifying crime and protecting areas. There also is no plan for people to ensure that this is ethical and fair for all people living in this city. There has been some thought about how implementing technology could help low-income people and people with disabilities, but it does not explain any logistics or how they will use the data being collected. With the police being the ones with access to all of this surveillance, this could turn into another way of exploiting certain groups of people.