A Survey of Major Data Privacy Laws, Languages and Approaches in Smart Cities Environments

Nowadays, the adoption of smart cities worldwide is accelerating the digital transformation of urban environments. Besides, a huge amount of data is being exchanged through the smart devices, networks, cloud infrastructure, big data analysis and Internet of Things (IoT) applications both in private and public sector. This exchange of data aims to provide better services and to ensure a good quality of life for citizens. However, the use of smart applications raises several concerns regarding the violation of data privacy. Various privacy-preserving approaches have been proposed in the literature treating specific aspects of privacy in smart cities environments. Hence, comprehensive mechanisms are needed towards protecting data privacy including privacy preferences of citizens, organizations privacy policies, and privacy laws and regulations. In this paper, we provide a review of recent work dealing with privacy in smart cities. Furthermore, we make a comparison between some of the most known privacy laws and regulations. The aim is to show the importance of legal compliance in the privacy preserving process. In addition, a case study is presented to show these laws can be considered by the different stakeholders.