Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
progressively make local governments and administrative bodies confront with a
new legal environment, which does not allow them to use authoritative and dis-
cretionary powers to the extent admitted in traditional administrative law. This is
particularly true with respect to personal data, the regime of which is mandatorily
provided by law provisions laying on principles posed by national and interna-
tional (EC
2011
;EC
2012
) sources (such as, in the European Union, the EU
directives and regulations dealing with data protection). Other sectors of private
law at large that are increasingly relevant to smart cities in connection with the
various communication issues involved by smart cities are industrial and intel-
lectual property law (including copyright law) and commercial law (including the
realm of e-commerce).
Certainly there are ample fields relevant to smart cities programs where
administrative law needs to apply and develop, especially in connection with urban
programs, and also a need for public incentives (through financial and investment
plans), however, the essence of smart cities as a matter of regulation in every
jurisdiction, its ''raw material'' if we can so say, seems to be information, which
calls for an assessment of the nature and limits of the intervention of legislators,
especially in connection with data protection and data security.
On the contrary, because of the wide range of applications and procedures that
are commonly referred to when talking about smart cities, it is hard to imagine
single statutes capable of governing all legal aspects relevant to smart cities.
3.1.3
The Need and Rationale for a Legal Intervention
in the Data Protection Sector
The above observations may induce to believe that the issue of data protection in
connection with smart cities is essentially a compliance issue, consisting of
assessing on a case-by-case basis compliance of smart-cities programs with
mandatory provisions. This approach would be however misleading under many
respects.
First of all, such approach could not but be based on the assumption that law
provisions exist efficiently governing the specific privacy and data security issues
relevant to smart cities, while, this is not exactly the case. It seems, on the con-
trary, that smart cities deserve some special consideration by legislators (Orlando
2012
) as far as the legal regime of data protection is concerned, in order to capture
and govern, through new law provisions, the specific challenges raised by smart
cities to privacy and security.
Law provisions (Mattei
2011
) dealing with data protection, far from being stable
and immutable, are subject to continuous changes and adaptations. Generally
speaking, the main drivers of changes to law provisions dealing with data protection
are of two kinds: (i) technological changes (to make simple and self-evident
examples, it is easy to understand the peculiar problems in data security and data
protection historically triggered by the advent of digital technologies, and more
recently by cloud computing and the internet of the things), and (ii) the consideration
