Singapore's 'city brain' project is groundbreaking -- but what about privacy?

You've read about cities installing smart parking meters and noise- and air-quality sensors, but are you ready to embrace the idea of a city brain? The residents of Singapore are on track to do just that. Creating a centralized dashboard view of sensors deployed across a distributed network is nothing new, but it takes on a bigger -- perhaps ominous -- meaning when deployed across a major city. Many technologically advanced cities worldwide are exploring ways to build such comprehensive digital views for managing traffic and parking, monitoring water and air quality, and offering such citizen-facing services as web-based tools for interacting with government agencies. Some smart city experts call this system approach a "city brain" or, less glamorously, a "municipal backplane."