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While projects to increase connected infrastructures in urban areas have started growing in the past few years, fully smart cities are only now starting to be built from the ground up. In October 2019, Sidewalk, a division of Google, received government approval to move forward with its plan for a £1.3 billion smart city infrastructure in Toronto.

The scheme aims to build one of the most advanced hyperconnected cities in the world, where everything in the urban area can not only connect, but also interact with its people. In this smart city, pavements will be heated via sensors and a network of underground tunnels will allow automated robots to deliver goods without clogging up roads. Thanks to rapid urban growth, 65% of the world population will be dwelling in cities by 2040, making this technology even more important to best manage the scale of our new cities.

A city tailored to your preferences

One of the greatest benefits to residents of smart cities is the level of personalisation on offer allowing users to tailor their experience of workspaces, homes or even city services.

In smart workplaces, for example, buildings can automatically register that you’ve logged in and set the facilities in your meeting room to your desired lighting ambience or temperature through a process called commercial building automation. Similarly, bike hire schemes can register your preferred route to work, and suggest ways to avoid the traffic, to help you get to where you need to be.

To achieve this level of personalisation, connected systems need a way to identify each user and tailor everything to their preferences. With a fingerprint authentication-driven digital identity solution, users can authenticate themselves and connect to systems based on personal information. This means all technology in a smart city, from lighting choices to building temperatures, can be attuned to each identity allowing citizens to enjoy personalised city experiences.

Securing smart cities

While smart cities can offer unprecedented levels of convenience to improve our everyday lives they also rely on vast networks of data, including personal customer information to predict our preferences. This has led to concerns around the high levels of data used and stored by smart systems, and the security provided to our digital identity.

We know that existing personal and unique identifiers, such as passwords and PINs are no longer secure enough to protect our systems, and this is even more important in hyper-connected cities as, once a city becomes ‘smart’ the inter-connected networks widen, and the potential for cyberattacks or data breaches grows. So as this trend continues, how can we develop smart cities that are both convenient and secure?

To resolve this, providers of smart city networks need to establish a chain of trust in their technology. This is a process common in cybersecurity, where each component in a network is validated by a secure root. In wide connected networks, this is vital to protect sensitive personal or business data and ensure consumer trust in the whole system.

Therefore, a biometric digital identity should sit at the root of that chain of trust in smart city networks. Here, a smart ID or digital ID solution embedded with a fingerprint sensor can provide users with the ability to personalise systems as well as ensure that only the right people have access to specific information – all in one secure element.

Protecting citizen data

By eliminating passwords and PINs, fingerprint authentication digital ID solutions will provide a revolutionary step in the field of cybersecurity and allay some of the concerns around the security of the large levels of data needed in a hyper-connected city.

Ultimately, in the smart cities of the future, digital ID is the ideal solution to balance personalised services with a high level of authentication, security and privacy and ensure that we can live in a city tailored to us.