For years, Gwen Shaffer has been leading Long Beach, Calif. residents on “data walks,” pointing out public Wi-Fi routers, security cameras, smart water meters, and parking kiosks. The goal, according to the professor of journalism and public relations at California State University, Long Beach, was to learn how residents felt about the ways in which their city collected data on them.
She also identified a critical gap in smart city design today: While cities may disclose how they collect data, they rarely offer ways to opt out. Shaffer spoke with IEEE Spectrum about the experience of leading data walks, and about her research team’s efforts to give citizens more control over the data collected by public technologies.
What was the inspiration for your data walks?
Gwen Shaffer: I began facilitating data walks in 2021. I was studying residents’ comfort levels with city-deployed technologies that collect personally identifiable information. My first career as a political reporter has influenced my research approach. I feel strongly about conducting applied rather than theoretical research. And I always go into a study with the goal of helping to solve a real-world challenge and inform policy.
How did you organize the walks?
Shaffer: We posted data privacy labels with a QR code that residents can scan and find out how their data are being used. Downtown, they’re in Spanish and English. In Cambodia Town, we did them in Khmer and English.
What happened during the walks?
Shaffer: I’ll give you one example. In a couple of the city-owned parking garages, there are automated license-plate readers at the entrance. So when I did the data walks, I talked to our participants about how they feel about those scanners. Because once they have your license plate, if you’ve parked for fewer than two hours, you can breeze right through. You don’t owe money.
Responses were contextual and sometimes contradictory. There were residents who said, “Oh, yeah. That’s so convenient. It’s a time saver.” So I think that shows how residents are willing to make trade-offs. Intellectually, they hate the idea of the privacy violation, but they also love convenience.
What surprised you most?
Shaffer: One of the participants said, “When I go to the airport, I can opt out of the facial scan and still be able to get on the airplane. But if I want to participate in so many activities in the city and not have my data collected, there’s no option.”
There was a cyberattack against the city in November 2023. Even though we didn’t have a prompt asking about it, people brought it up on their own in almost every focus group. One said, “I would never connect to public Wi-Fi, especially after the city of Long Beach’s site was hacked.”
What is the app your team is developing?
Shaffer: Residents want agency. So that’s what led my research team to connect with privacy engineers at Carnegie Mellon University, in Pittsburgh. Norman Sadeh and his team had developed what they called the IoT Assistant. So I told them about our project, and proposed adapting their app for city-deployed technologies. Our plan is to give residents the opportunity to exercise their rights under the California Consumer Privacy Act with this app. So they could say, “Passport Parking app, delete all the data you’ve already collected on me. And don’t collect any more in the future.”
This article appears in the December 2025 print issue as “Gwen Shaffer.”
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