Homelessness and privacy: challenges from AI and smart technologies in the city

As artificial intelligence (AI) and smart technologies are being increasingly implemented in cities around the world, examining the issue of privacy has become even more important – especially for the homeless. The homeless may be especially vulnerable to changes created by such technologies because of their inability to escape public and collective spaces. This article draws on Helen Nissenbaum’s theory of privacy as “contextual integrity” to detect privacy breaches and to explore the changes that AI and smart technologies are creating in three different contexts for the homeless. These contexts are: in public and collective spaces, when using personal technologies, and in spaces of aid. In all three contexts, AI and smart technologies are found to change key aspects of previous information-sharing norms by increasing the ease of information transfers, especially for more intimate information, and altering interpretative and decision-making processes. These changes may create new dangers for the homeless, by producing new risks of punishment and decreasing their agency, as well as new opportunities, by increasing their protection and agency in other ways. Such findings suggest a need for further investigation into the ethics of such changes to privacy and into methods for the homeless to exert more agency.