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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Privacy Notice to the Public
This is a Privacy Notice for VivaCity Sensors. These sensors look like on the image.
A sign is located on the post mounting the sensor, to direct the public to this web page.
These sensors are not CCTV Cameras.
VivaCity sensors are designed to produce Anonymous Traffic Data (see an example below) on how roads are being used to support transport operation and planning. During normal operations, no personal data is produced by these sensors.
Anonymous Traffic Data: e.g. counts of different classes or road user
This Privacy Notice explains how, during short periods of system development and testing, video may be recorded. While this video is classed as personal data, it will not be used for the purpose of identifying any individual.
A typical sensor will record less than 1 hour of Video Data during its lifetime.
The short video data captured by these sensors are processed by Vivacity Labs Limited.
We take the protection of your data very seriously and have implemented appropriate technical and organisational measures to ensure its security. Only authorised personnel have access to the data and it is stored on secure servers.
Categories of Data: video data of public roads.
Data Sharing – Anonymous Traffic Data: We share data with our customers, including government agencies and transport planning authorities for the purposes of supporting and improving traffic flow and transportation planning. Some customers choose to open this data or share it further.
Data Sharing – Video Data: We blur any video data prior to sharing with our customers, including government agencies and transport planning authorities. This data is only shared to provide contextual information about the environment around the sensors, or to validate the accuracy of the Anonymous Traffic Data.
Data Retention – Video Data: A 10 minute video from each sensor is retained for the lifetime of the sensor deployment to test software updates. A subset of Video Data is retained for testing and developing the sensors.
Your Rights: You have the right to access, rectify or erase your personal data. You also have the right to object to the processing of your personal data and to lodge a complaint with the supervisory authority.
Changes to Privacy Notice: We may update this privacy notice from time to time in order to reflect changes to our data collection and processing activities. The latest version will always be available on our website.
If you have any questions about our privacy notice, please contact the Data Protection Officer at dataprotection@vivacitylabs.com.
This notice is in compliance with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
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.
VivaCity 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.