Prato is a City well known in Italy with its about 200.000 inhabitants and its location not far away from Florence. Its identity is strongly related to its textile pole and the huge Chinese community, which made it one of the most flourishing cities in Italy between the 60s the 80s, at the time of the Italian economic boom, strongly based on mid-sized cities and the textile. Due to the crisis of that sector, when companies started investing in the far east, Prato had to find new solutions. In the late 90s, the City started working on EU projects, particularly on pilot projects, in the framework of programs like CIP. They are then today strong of an important experience in projects cofounded by the European Commission and, in the last ten years, related to data. Recently, Prato worked with an important project called ROUTE-TO-PA, to involve more citizens in their open data strategy, and today they invest strongly on a new European project called DataVaults.
Copyright: © APT di Prato
Personal data has been a major discussion issue in the last years, due to the new regulations in the European Union and the breakthrough of the big players who started harvesting personal data for marketing and commercial purposes.
Many initiatives to protect data has started, often called “anti-google” or “anti-facebook”, being those somehow considered iconic in this commercial exploitation, such as Qwant, which was adopted by some public authorities like Issy-les-Moulineaux and the Hauts de Seine department in France.
These initiatives are often “spot” and there is not a real method or complete strategy.
Datavaults, a project co-funded by the European Commission through the Horizon 2020 program, aims to address the bigger and bigger concerns about privacy, by allowing individuals to take ownership and control of their data and share them at will.
One of the major reasons of the success of Prato at European level is Paolo Boscolo, IT Director at the City and IT manager at the NGO Major Cities of Europe, which started pushing the presence of the City in those, about 20 years ago.
Paolo, managing both ROUTE-TO-PA and DataVaults in Prato, accepted to exchange a few words with us about their participation to EU projects and more precisely on Datavaults, its deployment and the expected results in Prato.
Can you explain us your story in the EU projects?
At the beginning, we used to coordinate the projects, 4 of them, mainly in programs like CIP and COMPACT. Our strategy was to use platforms or tools already existing and to work to deploy them here, also combination those with other solutions deployed elsewhere. It was useful for us to work in this way. Today, it is more complicated as often the projects are more R&D oriented, then we can experiment, but the solutions often do not stay in place at the end of the project, while the ones of those 4 projects are still there 15 years later. A recent successful example is ROUTE-TO-PA, as we use here some components. This success is due to the platform, which already existed, and it would have been funded anyway. The best projects are the ones that may exist even without EU funding.
You mentioned some difficulties with the new programs, but you keep working on the projects, what is your advantage today?
There is a double advantage, on one side the City tests solutions, it is useful to have a say (and to see) what works and what not. At the same time, there is an advantage for the companies, which can know after real tests how to design their products, and the citizens, having services and products shaped on them.
Let’s talk about DataVaults, can you explain us this project in the simplest possible way?
DataVaults wants to change the business model around personal data, giving back the control of data to people, even to have financial advantages. The model today is based on “stealing” personal data from the private citizens to resell them to the Cities. This principle is quite unacceptable as it is unfair for people. A concrete example is related to a big player like Mastercard, this is giving credit cards for free, but in exchange they get the data for free. This data, extremely deep (location, type of purchases…), is then sold to cities, then the customer thinks to have the data for free, but he/she pays it through local taxes. This is an unfair business model. At the same time, often people accept to give data to private companies, but not to cities, and it is absurd.
Then Cities are “data seekers” and the projects wishes to create a platform in which a citizen can put its data. This would have advantages for everyone, but not the big data companies, making available to the city (customer) data that they would not have, letting the citizen have control on data and get remunerated and making the platform provider to get paid.
What is the pilot of Prato about?
Prato works on a double pilot, on one side it would like to make easily accessible the certificates (such as birth or marriage), avoiding to request the reasons of the use, as it is today, also for GDPR compliance, on the other they would like to test the collection of citizens/tourist personal data like position, moving path around the city, attendance of different events, profile data. This would enable us to carry out analyses of service fruition and improve the related offer, serving these insights also to commercial operators willing to pay for access to such kind of massive data.
When will this happen?
The pilot will be between the second half of 2021 and the end of 2022. The project will end in the first months of 2023.
This project will be successful for Prato if…
I don’t consider this project to solve the data problem, but I think that it will be a real success if it will prove that a platform of this kind may work. This will give indications to the commission to make the right policies for the future and to break this unfair business model. All countries, including EU with a lot of initiatives, are moving in this directions, but we need to not how to do.
See another interview of Paolo Boscolo with Giorgio Prister, president of Major Cities of Europe.
This article can be read also in French.
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