We believe strongly that the future of the Smart City has to be citizen-centric, and that keeping citizens’ data safe and private is critical to the success of this technology. As such, we have designed our solutions from the ground up to guarantee the privacy of every citizen, utilising privacy-by-design principles.
Privacy-by-design.
Our sensors are designed to provide accurate data on the usage statistics of road environments in a completely anonymous way. The system was developed using data protection-by-design principles and is fully compliant with GDPR. Our sensors do not collect personal data, and none of our clients can use our technologies to gather any kind of personal data or for enforcement purposes, ever.
Our sensors do not record or stream video footage. Under normal operation, the system processes all video locally, produces anonymous data feeds and discards the video within milliseconds. As such the system produces no personal data and therefore presents no privacy or personal data risk.
Data Security.
The software does not have the ability to identify anything unique about individual vehicles. We have also never done any work involving facial recognition and we will never do so as it violates our commitment to privacy.
The sensor software and memory is encrypted and all communication to and from the sensor is encrypted using industry standard HTTPs TLS1.3 security.
There are a small number of occasions when the sensors are not under normal operation. During initial setup of the sensor, it may be necessary to store up to an hour of video to allow us to configure and calibrate the system. Once set up, this video is also deleted. To continue to grow our image training set, which helps to improve system accuracy, we may, only with the permission of our clients, choose to extract a few sample images from each new sensor installation to add into our training set.
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Clear Communication.
We will always provide temporary signage in the vicinity of a sensor before gathering images for set-up, calibration or optional software training purposes. These signs state,
“New road space usage sensors installed, once fully operational they will only produce anonymous data. Video may be intermittently recorded at this location during this initial project phase, for the purpose of system development and testing”.
The images captured are low resolution and do not contain Personal Data as defined by the ICO.
ICO & GDPR.
Viva are registered with the ICO to enable us to collect and hold image data for the purpose of developing software to extract anonymous data from video feeds. We act as the data controller for the software training process. We have carried out Privacy Impact Assessments for this work. If requested, we will not extract any training data from a given sensor.
Read more about our approach here or please contact us for further detail on our robust Data Privacy and GDPR policy.