Privacy and Security in Cognitive Cities: A Systematic Review

The emerging paradigm of the cognitive city, which augments smart cities with learning and behavioral change capabilities, is gaining increasing attention as a promising solution to the challenges of future mega-cities. Cognitive cities are built upon artificial learning and behavioral analysis techniques founded on the exploitation of human-machine collective intelligence. Hence, cognitive cities rely on the sharing of citizens’ daily-life data, which might be considered sensitive personal data. In this context, privacy and security of the shared information become critical issues that have to be addressed to guarantee the proper deployment of cognitive cities and the fundamental rights of people. This article provides a thorough literature review using the recommendations for systematic reviews proposed by Vom Brocke et al. and the PRISMA statement. We analyze peer-reviewed publications indexed in ACM Digital Library, IEEE Xplore, Scopus, and Web of Science until July 2020. We identify the main challenges on privacy and information security within cognitive cities, and the proposals described in the literature to address them. We conclude that many challenges remain open and we suggest several research lines that will require further examination in the years to come.