The Stratusmeind Living Lab (SLL) is an ongoing project on the prominent Stratumseind nightlife street in the city of Eindhoven, the Netherlands. The SLL is an umbrella project organised in the form of a public-private partnership, within which extensive data-driven surveillance of a public street is taking place. The goals are to make the street more secure, attractive and lucrative. In order to achieve these goals a variety of innovative strategies such as dynamic lighting and (big) data analysis are being tested and deployed.
These surveillance activities potentially lead to serious privacy concerns, including a loss of autonomy, confrontation with unwanted information, de-individualisation, stigmatisation, exclusion, unfair treatment, and discrimination when used for decision making. These issues are further complicated by the fact that this is happening in public space, since the need for privacy protection in public (as opposed to private) spaces is usually not adequately covered by existing legal frameworks.
As projects such as the SLL are already common practice in cities around the world – and many more will be popping-up in the future – this research delves into arising privacy issues, trying to locate or conceptualise (the right to) privacy in public.
Maša Galič is a PhD researcher at the Tilburg Institute for Law, Technology and Society (TILT), the Netherlands. Her research primarily focuses on the right to privacy in the context of data-driven surveillance of physical public space. She was awarded the VIE-prize by the Dutch Association for Intellectual Property for the best publication by a young scholar enhancing the understanding of IPR in the Netherlands in 2015/2016.
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