Privacy in Smart Buildings: Workshop report

On Thursday 8 March PETRAS organised a workshop on the challenges of privacy in smart buildings.

The aim of the workshop was to lead the co-design of a Demonstrator that enables researchers to access data produced by smart buildings, in a secure and ethical way. The event was organised at Newcastle University Urban Sciences by Charles Morisset, who is leading the PETRAS NUSBIoT project for Newcastle, with the support of Alisdair Ritchie, PETRAS Impact Champion.

A number of key academic, industrial and governmental partners attended the workshop – including Costain, Critical Insight and Siemens, and with academics from Imperial and the University of Warwick also in attendance.

A key highlight of the initial discussion was to emphasise that the crucial problem of accessing smart building data should be part of the information management problem, as described by Digital Built Britain. Furthermore, the decision-making of enabling interested parties to access smart data should include a thorough security risk assessment, which requires integrated data modelling.

During the first open session of the workshop, the participants identified a wide range of possible data sources which could be concerned by the Demonstrator, including for instance building system data, IT data, publicly available data from the designers of the building, or even social media data. It is particularly crucial to measure the accuracy, precision and calibration of the collected data.

The second open session focused on the main concerns to consider when making an information management decision, including for instance the upcoming GDPR, the reputational risk of the organisation, the data provenance, or the purpose of accessing the data. The participants also highlighted the legal and ethical considerations related to collecting data in a working rather than a home environment.

In conclusion, the outputs of the two sessions enabled the participants to discuss the two main aspects the Demonstrator should consider: the security risk assessment required to make information management decisions, and the information governance process with the corresponding socio-technical aspects.