In Kansas City you trade your data for Wi-Fi

I’ve long wondered what it takes to make a city “smart.” The tech world tosses around the phrase “smart city” to encompass a wide variety of projects, from sensors in lights to track gunfire to putting Wi-Fi on municipal transportation. Kansas City is the latest to try to create a smart city.

The municipality, famous for its barbecue and for being the first stop for Google Fiber, has created a Wi-Fi connected corridor that stretches for 2.2-miles along one of its streetcar lines. Kansas City’s Chief Innovation Officer, Bob Bennett, told me that the smart city effort started with Wi-Fi and now encompasses informational kiosks that can offer directions and local information, streetlights that dynamically change based on the time of day and the number of people around, and stoplights that can be remotely controlled to improve the flow of traffic.

The project also includes sensors that can tell city officials about the conditions of the roads and the number of people downtown. The Wi-Fi is provided by Sprint, the lighting intelligence by Sensity (which also works with Simon Property Group) and the entire project is managed by Cisco. Bennett says that when he needs something, he tells Cisco and it finds a vendor to work with the city. His recommendation for others contemplating such a mammoth project? “Get yourself a large organization to be your umbrella,” he says.

When asked how he defines a smart city, Bennett was practical. “A smart city is the ability to interact with and be proactive for our citizens through the use of data,” he says. To him, the core feature that helped turn KC into a smart city is the Wi-Fi network. Everything else stems from there. It also is the reason that local citizens embraced the project, despite the fact that it is collecting a lot of data on them.

For example, Bennett says that the Wi-Fi and sensors can tell that “it’s Bob Bennett’s phone walking down the street.” That data is then shunted to Pinsight Media, a mobile data analytics firm owned by Sprint. So the information about a particular person’s phone goes to a data collection firm, but Bennett says he never gets to see it. Instead, he sees heat maps of where people are walking and can get data such as the number of people who might pass by a particular corner each day.

That information is crucial for services such as traffic management, but it’s also useful as an economic development or commercial real estate tool. What is less clear is how much of the data the city actually owns. Yes, it can provide tools and offer its data flows as a service, but the worry with government data is that officials may realize after it’s too late that if they want to switch to a different provider, they could lose access to their data.

Bennett isn’t as concerned about the data as long as he gets what he needs, and he’s also a proponent of the current KC model that has the partners exchanging some of their expertise in exchange for data about the local citizenry as they wander through the connected areas of town. Bennett says that private firms supplied between $14 million and $20 million worth of gear in exchange for data.

So when walking the streets of Kansas City know that when you are logging onto the local Wi-Fi, or merely pinging it if your phone’s Wi-Fi network is turned on, you’re helping support some really cool municipal services such as being able to dim streetlights if no one is around. You are also sharing some of your data with a marketing firm and potentially other providers. Is this the tradeoff to make cities smart?