Bridging the regulatory gaps created by Smart and Connected technologies in South Africa
Article Sidebar
Main Article Content
Abstract
The prevalence of technology-embedded products, services, and cities, described colloquially as ‘smart’ technologies and ‘smart’ cities, has seen a spate of unprecedented growth in recent years. South Africa (SA) has not been left behind, with smartphones, smart watches, and smart voice-controlled virtual personal assistants such as Amazon’s Alexa now frequently used. But while these technologies hold great promise to revolutionise homes, offices and cities, their adoption poses challenges to individual and collective interests and wellbeing. After demonstrating the legal and ethical difficulties brought about by the introduction of these technologies, this article explores whether SA legislation is sufficiently robust to address these challenges. While the current legislative landscape addresses certain crucial difficulties – such as the safeguarding of personal data by the Protection of Personal Information Act No. 4 of 2013 (‘POPIA’) – it is suggested that the position regulating other aspects of smart technology adoption is, in large part, fragmented and ill-equipped to deal with some of the more pressing legal and ethical questions. Our contention is that, not dissimilar to the issues arising from artificial intelligence-based technological adoption, the extant legislative and regulatory frameworks do not go far enough in addressing the many concerns emerging from recent novel technological design, development, and deployment. Not only do smart technologies give rise to unique challenges, so does their deployment within the Global South and in South Africa, in particular. We suggest that appropriate and effective regulatory reform measures be undertaken in SA to provide better ethical guidance and policy prescriptions buttressed by rigorous regulatory oversight.
Article Details
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
The SAJBL is published under an Attribution-Non Commercial International Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY-NC 4.0) License. Under this license, authors agree to make articles available to users, without permission or fees, for any lawful, non-commercial purpose. Users may read, copy, or re-use published content as long as the author and original place of publication are properly cited.
Exceptions to this license model is allowed for UKRI and research funded by organisations requiring that research be published open-access without embargo, under a CC-BY licence. As per the journals archiving policy, authors are permitted to self-archive the author-accepted manuscript (AAM) in a repository.
How to Cite
References
Lupton D, Pink S, Horst H. Living in, with and beyond the ‘smart home’: Introduction to the special issue. Convergence 2021;27(5):1147-1154. https:// doi.org/10.1177/13548565211052736 w
BSI. Smart cities framework. Guide to establishing strategies for smart cities and communities. PAS 181:2014. https://www.bsigroup.com/en-GB/smart-cities/ Smart-Cities-Standards-and-Publication/PAS-181-smart-cities-framework/ (accessed 16 September 2022).
Kunst A. Smart home device ownership in South Africa 2020. Statista, 2022.
https://www.statista.com/forecasts/826546/ownership-of-smart-home- devices-in-south-africa (accessed 30 August 2022).
EU High-Level Expert Group. Ethics Guidelines for Trustworthy AI. European Commission, 2019. https://ec.europa.eu/futurium/en/ai-alliance-consultation.1.html (accessed 30 August 2022).
Shirani F, Groves C, Henwood K, Pidgeon N, Roberts E. ‘I’m the smart meter’: Perceptions of smart technology amongst vulnerable consumers. Energy Policy 2020;144:1-29. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.enpol.2020.111637
Goodman EP. Smart city ethics. In: Dubber MD, Pasquale F, Das S, eds. The Oxford Handbook of Ethics in AI. London: Oxford Academic, 2020:823-839.
Bibri SE. The IoT for smart sustainable cities of the future: An analytical framework for sensor-based big data applications for environmental sustainability. Sustainable Cities Soc 2018;38:230-253. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scs.2017.12.034
South Africa. Protection of Personal Information Act No. 4 of 2013, section 16(1).
South Africa. Medicines and Related Substances Act No. 101 of 1965. Section
B(1)(a).
South Africa. Medicines and Related Substances Act No. 101 of 1965. Section
(3)(a)(iii).
South Africa. Consumer Protection Act No. 68 of 2008. Preamble and section 3.
Constitution of the Republic of South Africa 1996. Section 9(3).
South Africa. Promotion of Equality and Prevention of Unfair Discrimination Act
No. 4 of 2000, sections 6 - 9.
South Africa. Consumer Protection Act No. 68 of 2008. Sections 8(1)(a) - (g).
Yigitcanlar T, Kamruzzaman M, Foth M, Sabatini-Marques J, da Costa E, Ioppolo G. Can
cities become smart without being sustainable? A systematic review of the literature.
Sustainable Cities Soc 2019;45:348-365. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scs.2018.11.033
Botes WM. Autonomy and the social dilemma of online manipulative behavior. Springer Nature 2023;3:315-323. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43681-022-00157-5
Zuboff S. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. London: Profile Books, 2019.
Falco G. Death by AI: Where assured autonomy in smart cities meets the end-to-end argument. Cornell University, 2020. https://doi.org/10.48550/
arXiv.2002.11625
South Africa. Protection of Personal Information Act No. 4 of 2013. Section 6(1)(a).
South Africa. Protection of Personal Information Act No. 4 of 2013. Section 71(1).
Townsend BA. Software as a medical device: Critical rights software-based health
technologies in South Africa. TSAR 2020;4:747-762.
Koerth M. You can’t opt out of sharing your data, even if you didn’t opt in.
FiveThirtyEight, 2018. https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/you-cant-opt-out-of-
sharing-your-data-even-if-you-didnt-opt-in/ (accessed 12 August 2022).
Carole Cadwalladr C, Graham-Harrison E. Revealed: 50 million Facebook profiles harvested for Cambridge Analytica in major data breach. Guardian, 17 March 2018. https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/mar/17/cambridge-analytica-
facebook-influence-us-election (accessed 13 August 2022).
OT v Vyriausioji tarnybinės etikos komisija C-184/20,ECLI:EU:C:2022:601
Cooper MP, O’Shea DS. Special Category Data by Inference: CJEU significantly
expands the scope of Article 9 GDPR. Insider Privacy, 2022. https://www. insideprivacy.com/eu-data-protection/special-category-data-by-inference-cjeu- significantly-expands-the-scope-of-article-9-gdpr/ (accessed 12 August 2022).
Yigitcanlar T, Kamruzzaman M, Foth M, Sabatini-Marques J, da Costa E, Ioppolo G. Can cities become smart without being sustainable? A systematic review of the literature. Sustainable Cities Soc 2019;45:348-365. https://doi.org/10.1016/j. scs.2018.11.033
Van Heek J, Arning K, Ziefle M. How fear of crime affects needs for privacy & safety: Acceptance of surveillance technologies in smart cities. Paper presented at the SMARTGREENS Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Smart Cities and Green ICT Systems 2016:32-43. http://doi.org/10.5220/0005761900320043
Pink S, Gomes A, Zilse R, et al. Automated and connected? Smartphones and automobility through the global south. Appl Mobilities 2021;6(1):54-70. https:// doi.org/10.1080/23800127.2018.1505263
Thaler RH, Sunstein CR. Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness. London: Penguin Books, 2008.
Sætra HS. When nudge come to shove: Liberty and nudging in the era of big data. Techn Soc 2019;(59):101-130. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.techsoc.2019.04.006
Gray C, Kou Y, Battles B, Hoggatt, J, Toombs A. The dark (patterns) side of UX design.
CHI ‘18: Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing
Systems April 2018;534:1-14. https://doi.org/10.1145/3173574.3174108
Mathur A, Acar G, Friedman MJ, et al. Dark patterns at scale: Findings from a crawl of 11K shopping websites. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer
Interaction 2019;3:1-32. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.1907.07032
South Africa. Electronic Communications and Transactions Act No. 25 of 2002 (as
amended, 2012). Section 4(1).
South Africa, Consumer Protection Act No. 68 of 2008. Sections 16(3) and 17(2).
South Africa. Electronic Communications and Transactions Act No. 25 of 2002 (as
amended, 2012). Sections 42(2)(a), (c), (h) and (j).
South Africa. Consumer Protection Act No. 68 of 2008. Section 16(1).
Hamann B, Papadopoulos S. Direct marketing and spam via electronic communications: An analysis of the regulatory framework in South Africa. De Jure 2014;3:42-62. https://www.dejure.up.ac.za/articles-vol-47-1/papadopoulos-
s-hamann-b (accessed 1 September 2022).
Sturmer J. Facial recognition: Where is it being used, and how does the
technology work? ABC, 2017. http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-10-05/how- is-facial-recognition-technology-already-being-used/9019526 (accessed 1 September 2022).
Nambiar R, Shroff R, Handy S. Smart cities: Challenges and opportunities. 10th International Conference on Communication Systems & Networks (COMSNETS), 2018. https://ieeexplore-ieee-org.proxy.bnl.lu/stamp/stamp. jsp?tp=&arnumber=8328204 (accessed 1 September 2022).
South Africa. Regulation of Interception of Communications and Provision of Communication Related Information Act No. 70 of 2002. Section 12.
South Africa. Regulation of Interception of Communications and Provision of Communication Related Information Act No. 70 of 2002. Section 2.
South Africa. Regulation of Interception of Communications and Provision of Communication Related Information Act No. 70 of 2002. Sections 1(2)(a)(ii) and 1(1).
South Africa. Regulation of Interception of Communications and Provision of Communication Related Information Act No. 70 of 2002. Section 3(a).
South Africa. Regulation of Interception of Communications and Provision of Communication Related Information Act No. 70 of 2002. Sections 1(1), 16(3) or 18(3)(a).
South Africa. Regulation of Interception of Communications and Provision of Communication Related Information Act No. 70 of 2002. Section 1(1).
South Africa. Regulation of Interception of Communications and Provision of Communication Related Information Act No. 70 of 2002. Section 16.
South Africa. Regulation of Interception of Communications and Provision of Communication Related Information Act No. 70 of 2002. Section 16(5).
South Africa. Regulation of Interception of Communications and Provision of Communication Related Information Act No. 70 of 2002. Section 7.
Herszenhorn D. Heightened security, visible and invisible, blankets the Olympics. New York Times, 14 February 2014. https://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/14/ sports/olympics/heightened-security-visible-and-invisible-blankets-the- olympics.html (accessed 1 September 2022).
Government of Japan. ‘Suspect detection system’ that used digital video and image analysis technology, leads to success at Sochi Olympics (Russia) (in Japanese). JETRO, 2019. https://www.jetro.go.jp/biz/areareports/2019/7235b3b d2d9209d7.html (accessed 1 September 2022).
Wright J. Suspect AI: Vibraimage, emotion recognition technology and algorithmic opacity. Sci Technol Soc 2021. https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/ papers/2009/2009.00502.pdf (accessed 1 September 2022).
Elmaghraby AS, Losavio MM. Cyber security challenges in smart cities: Safety, security and privacy. J Adv Res 2014;5(4):491-497. https://doi.org/10.1016/j. jare.2014.02.006
Politico Staff. Read Justice Alito’s initial draft abortion opinion which would overturn Roe v. Wade. Supreme Court. Politico, 2022. https://www.politico.com/ news/2022/05/02/read-justice-alito-initial-abortion-opinion-overturn-roe-v- wade-pdf-00029504 (accessed 5 September 2022).
Sabin S. Digital surveillance in a post-Roe world. Politico, 2022. https://www. politico.com/newsletters/digital-future-daily/2022/05/05/digital-surveillance- in-a-post-roe-world-00030459 (accessed 5 September 2022).
Abosaq NH. Impact of privacy issues on smart city services in a model smart city. Int J Adv Computer Sci Applications 2019;10(2):177-185. https://doi. org/10.14569/IJACSA.2019.0100224
Van Zoonen L. Privacy concerns in smart cities. Govern Inform Q 2016;33(3):472- 480. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.giq.2016.06.004
Cho YI. Designing smart cities: Security issues. In: Cortesi A, Chaki N, Saeed K, Wierzchoń S, eds. Computer Information Systems and Industrial Management. Berlin: Springer, 2012.
Van Heek J, Arning K, Ziefle M. How fear of crime affects needs for privacy & safety: Acceptance of surveillance technologies in smart cities. Paper presented at the SMARTGREENS Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Smart Cities and Green ICT Systems 2016:32-43. http://doi.org/10.5220/0005761900320043