This kind of things are rarely problems for locals* , so I can see how they might be a low priority for the government/police. Instead, solving poverty issues+better education seems to be a better solution (for me and for the cities) than trying to make it into a police state.
Example: one of the safest places in Spain I've seen are libraries in Universities. People leave their laptops and go to the toilet/for lunch and nothing happens. The unsafest places I'd say are beaches, clubs and main statios.
* which happens all around the world. I never thought I'd be scammed like this, being from Spain, but I was scammed in Vietnam!
This. People generally prefer to make an honest buck but when honest bucks are few and far between skimming your cut off the people who pass through using whatever means necessary becomes very attractive.
You even see this dynamic in in college towns where the college town and associated services are generally ok but all the surrounding communities run speed traps like their going out of style in order to skim a few bucks off of all the people passing through as a result of the college and the commerce it generates.
A healthy local economy generally prevents too many people from trying to make a dishonest buck.
At least for Barcelona the theft is incredibly organised, and with the assumption that a passing tourist will just pay to replace their phone or use their insurance, the theft itself might be far more lucrative than whatever honest buck is available.
It is generally only the tourists that are targeted, to the point where some people will tell you to yell at the assailant in Spanish to guilt them into giving your stuff back to show you're not one of the people they should be stealing from.
To show how bizarre this can be, on a purely anecdotal level, I was jumped in Barcelona more than once, and even with the opportunity to take my wallet and cash they ignored it and went only for the phone. Physical violence is avoided, more often than not.
Barcelona in particular has had an anti-tourism mentality for quite some time (and not without good reason) so a lot of this petty crime appears to exist as a result of that. This is just from experience of living there a few years, though.
Surveillance and police presence won't really solve this because of how sneaky the theft can be (e.g. knifing your pocket or rucksack while you sleep on the metro and sliding your phone out), the best deterrent is your own awareness. Good luck with that if you're out there to party.
Of course, the same can be said for any country enjoying its influx of wealthy tourists. Barcelona isn't unique in this.
in my experience, there's a tradeoff curve with "honesty" of income on one axis and time/effort spent per money on the other axis, and different people have different curves (at different times in their lives.)
Just ask my local police department - no point in pissing off your neighbors and voters issuing tickets when you can stick it to people passing through...
Sorry to hear you were robbed 10k. I'm not sure how much we can solve the robbing problem with surveillance.
I can talk a bit about the typical robbing that occurs in the more touristic places in the city. The police is very much aware of who the robbers are, and in fact most of them have been caught dozens of times, if not hundreds; they simply don't get punished, except with a small fine, so they keep doing it. It's disgraceful.
> they simply don't get punished, except with a small fine, so they keep doing it. It's disgraceful.
Violent thieves (robbers) get punished. Non-violent theft is treated more lightly unless is done on a big scale. This gives criminals a high incentive to not be violent.
I have heard that the theory is that if you hard punish any thief, then thieves are going to be more violent to not get caught. If you focus the police force on violent crime, then violent crime goes down.
Most criminals know that if they give themselves in when caught, they will get a more favourable sentence that if they resist.
The goal is to keep people safe first, then property. To punish criminals is a means to that goal, but just that. I think that in the USA there is a moral component where punishing criminals is a moral imperative, even if this causes worse crime or if people get wrongly punished. Or, at least, that is what I interpret from the news.
We have a number of holes in our legal system. The cause is not what you say, even if it's very reasonable. The cause is where we came from and technical debt after so many years of patches. We suffered a dictatorship until 1975. The climate was against police and pro-reo. It was good to abolish capital punishment and other relics. But we swinged too much the other way. A more dramatic example is how people under 18 can get away with rape and murder, just a slap in the wrist. Also parole is almost a given after doing half the sentence. So effectively our longest punishment is 15 years. That has changed for rapists and terrorists, but it's basically true for most other crimes.
No it is not that. The main reason is that even if you get caught stealing you only get something like 15- 30days of jail. It is like a two week vacation for a pocket picker, then they are out again.
In SouthEastern countries they get 1, 2 or up 4 years in jail. Guess, what? There is less of them in the streets and if they are less likely to do it again.
So, being too lenient in crime creates the nightmare that Barcelona is, and draws in criminals from the rest of Europe (it is still a very beautiful city to visit).
I know, by reputation the Balkan Region doesn't look good, but when you look at the data it paints a totally different picture. My hunch is that a lot of petty thieves types have moved into Western Europe as the business is more lucrative there.
numbeo is a measurement of perceptions of crime, not actual crime rates. Looking at Stockholm vs. Jeddah (Saudi Arabia), Stockholm comes off the worse for safely walking at night.
Agree. I installed a Nest Camera to keep my garage and car safe...guess what: they broke into my garage anyways and all I got is a useless video of it.
Camera’s are not a solution to stop crime!
One thing I gotta say though is that it helped with figuring out what got stolen ;)
Geez that's a bummer. My wife and I are going this summer and I've been researching all of the different scams. Definitely going to get a belt wallet for me and her, it sounds like pick pocketing is the most common issue.
I did this before I relocated there for a few years. It will raise your blood pressure and you'll be trying so hard to protect yourself from one scam that you'll get hit by another, and by the time you've done researching you'll have so little trust that you might see everything as a potential robbery.
Enjoy your time there, it's a beautiful city! Just make sure to minimise your risk by limiting what you carry around with you and never take your eyes off it. That way if you do get unlucky, you can still recover from it.
Within 5 minutes of arriving in Barcelona, a friend of mine was pickpocketed. Slick operation, 2 pretty girls as distraction and a boy to do the deed. We grabbed him and he gave it back and then the three of them just wandered off as if it was nothing. Which I suppose for them it was. This was in the main train station so there were cameras, cops around, clearly no deterrent.
My experience with Barcelona too, I witnessed a botched pickpocketing attempt just to the person next to me, when arriving to Plaza Catalunya. Way to give a bad first impression, after that the rest of the week was fine.
Apple Macbook Pro 15: $4600 (Mine)
Apple Macbook Pro 13: $2600 (Wife’s)
Ipad Pro: $1000
Versace Glasses: $400
Ray Ban: $300
Airpods: $250
Cash: $1300
Backpack: $150
Apple Fast Charger: $50
Fast Charging Brick: $45
The nice thing out of this incident was that I was able to transfer my Apple Care from my Apple Devices to my new replacement devices.
If you just walk in looking like a tourist to almost any metro car in barcelona people will attempt to rob you. I have never been to a place with so much blatant crime and I am from New Orleans.
The low level crime is absolutely insane in barcelona to the point I would recommend not going unless you are ready to get in shoving matches with attempted thieves.
I would absolutely recommend visiting. Barcelona is one of the most incredible cities in the world. Do a little research on the different areas. Don’t carry around 10k of valuables! And don’t leave your stuff lying around on the beach. Have an amazing time!
What the hell are you talking about. That has never been my experience nor the experience of people I know that have been there within the past 2 years. Don't fearmonger about crime.
I'm not fear mongering at all. I was there for like 3-4 days and had upwards of 3 encounters with people attempting to separate and rob my group on the metro.
That is insane. I'm not like some country bumpkin either, I am from New Orleans and so was my entire group. We didn't get robbed because we had to become physically aggressive with these groups of people and get in shoving matches and shit. It was ridiculous.
I have never experienced so much rampant theft in my life and I am fairly well traveled.
There are beautiful sights in Barcelona, but I doubt I will ever go back because it is completely lawless.
I have had gun fights happen right outside my house in New Orleans, almost everyone I know was mugged at some point growing up, there was an attempted rape in my driveway once, but it still has nothing on the volume of crime I witnessed in Barcelona.
> WITTES: The exact quotation, which is from a letter that Franklin is believed to have written on behalf of the Pennsylvania General Assembly, reads, those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.
> SIEGEL: And what was the context of this remark?
> WITTES: He was writing about a tax dispute between the Pennsylvania General Assembly and the family of the Penns, the proprietary family of the Pennsylvania colony who ruled it from afar. And the legislature was trying to tax the Penn family lands to pay for frontier defense during the French and Indian War. And the Penn family kept instructing the governor to veto. Franklin felt that this was a great affront to the ability of the legislature to govern. And so he actually meant purchase a little temporary safety very literally. The Penn family was trying to give a lump sum of money in exchange for the General Assembly's acknowledging that it did not have the authority to tax it.
> SIEGEL: So far from being a pro-privacy quotation, if anything, it's a pro-taxation and pro-defense spending quotation.
> WITTES: It is a quotation that defends the authority of a legislature to govern in the interests of collective security. It means, in context, not quite the opposite of what it's almost always quoted as saying but much closer to the opposite than to the thing that people think it means.
“Now we have a big contract with Vodafone, and every month Vodafone has to give machine readable data to city hall. Before, that didn’t happen. They just took all the data and used it for their own benefit”
So, now Vodafone AND the city government has this data about the citizens. How is this fighting against surveillance? Am I missing something? :/
The funny thing about democracy is that if you have a fairly egalitarian society, the government actually represents the views of, and works for the people. So the statement you quote is saying that the people, through their democratic system of represention, has control of the data.
Local power structures like local government tend to be quite good.
They have a copy, not control. Ranked from most abused to least abused, you have secret misuse and leaks, corporate misuse and leaks, and democratic misuse and leaks; and if they all get a copy you take their individual leak+misuse outputs and add them.
Metaphorically, you go from a criminal with a gun at your head to a criminal and a friend both with guns at your head.
The democratic majority is not your friend unless you are part of it. Think about anyone convicted of socially reprehensible crimes. The information that you used to be a pedophile will certainly make your life a living hell when it is used for the good of the people.
You're not. They're only improving transparency a little bit, but ultimately that same data can and will be abused by whichever government comes into power next.
I also wanted to add how deeply involved into surveillance Vodafone seems to be. I've started noticing it since some Snowden and Wikileaks revelations back. Helping governments enable surveillance on their populations seems to be kind of Vodafone's side-business.
Fair enough, but setting the expectation of participation and transparency is a worthwhile goal in and of itself, more important that any individual failure to actually realize it.
Indeed, with "fightback" I assumed either the citizens were destroying surveillance equipment or the city prevented surveillance equipment from being installed.
Turns out it's just the government getting its piece of the cake.
Reminded me that there's a cool monthly magazine [1] on other such projects, called Research EU. All 71 past editions are available in multiple languages, and downloadable.
The magazine "features highlights from the latest Results in Brief and project news from the world of European research and innovation" ... "where each issue covers a specific topic of interest to researchers, policymakers and other stakeholders in the research field."
That's an interesting development but all it will take to cause damage is a reversal of the fortunes of the political party that brings this about. You always have to worry about the next government, not the current one when you start creating databases.
And that next government may decide not to honor the citizens in the same way the present one does.
It is the responsibility of the citizens to make sure the next government honors these promises, right? A good example would be the abortion policy (https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/presidential...) Every republican president reverses what the previous democratic president did, and vice versa.
If the public doesn't care enough about these issues, then how can we expect politicians to care?
The Catalan independence movement would be serving to overcome the apathy which would otherwise be present. A significant number of Barcelonans would be keen to limit the ability of Madrid to use information from the phone network to squash dissent.
I just wanted to add a little update. This “direct democracy” voting system has already been put to test. The citizens voted against Colau’s party proposals. The official comment is that they “will take that into account”, but controversial plans still go forward.
If you were to ask me which city needs more surveillance, it would be Barcelona. The amount of petty crime, the constantly being approached by groups of people offering "services" and "products" is insane.
I love most cities, but that's the one place where I had a strange feeling -- I think I was afraid?
I think a city like Barcelona, with their theft and crime problem can make use of some sort of surveillance.
Just two weeks ago, 3 hours before ending my vacation in the city, Me and my wife were robbed off roughly worth $10k USD in a car tire puncture scam.
http://tourist-scams.com/tourist-scam-destinations/barcelona...
This kind of things are rarely problems for locals* , so I can see how they might be a low priority for the government/police. Instead, solving poverty issues+better education seems to be a better solution (for me and for the cities) than trying to make it into a police state.
Example: one of the safest places in Spain I've seen are libraries in Universities. People leave their laptops and go to the toilet/for lunch and nothing happens. The unsafest places I'd say are beaches, clubs and main statios.
* which happens all around the world. I never thought I'd be scammed like this, being from Spain, but I was scammed in Vietnam!
This. People generally prefer to make an honest buck but when honest bucks are few and far between skimming your cut off the people who pass through using whatever means necessary becomes very attractive.
You even see this dynamic in in college towns where the college town and associated services are generally ok but all the surrounding communities run speed traps like their going out of style in order to skim a few bucks off of all the people passing through as a result of the college and the commerce it generates.
A healthy local economy generally prevents too many people from trying to make a dishonest buck.
At least for Barcelona the theft is incredibly organised, and with the assumption that a passing tourist will just pay to replace their phone or use their insurance, the theft itself might be far more lucrative than whatever honest buck is available.
It is generally only the tourists that are targeted, to the point where some people will tell you to yell at the assailant in Spanish to guilt them into giving your stuff back to show you're not one of the people they should be stealing from.
To show how bizarre this can be, on a purely anecdotal level, I was jumped in Barcelona more than once, and even with the opportunity to take my wallet and cash they ignored it and went only for the phone. Physical violence is avoided, more often than not.
Barcelona in particular has had an anti-tourism mentality for quite some time (and not without good reason) so a lot of this petty crime appears to exist as a result of that. This is just from experience of living there a few years, though.
Surveillance and police presence won't really solve this because of how sneaky the theft can be (e.g. knifing your pocket or rucksack while you sleep on the metro and sliding your phone out), the best deterrent is your own awareness. Good luck with that if you're out there to party.
Of course, the same can be said for any country enjoying its influx of wealthy tourists. Barcelona isn't unique in this.
in my experience, there's a tradeoff curve with "honesty" of income on one axis and time/effort spent per money on the other axis, and different people have different curves (at different times in their lives.)
Just ask my local police department - no point in pissing off your neighbors and voters issuing tickets when you can stick it to people passing through...
Sorry to hear you were robbed 10k. I'm not sure how much we can solve the robbing problem with surveillance.
I can talk a bit about the typical robbing that occurs in the more touristic places in the city. The police is very much aware of who the robbers are, and in fact most of them have been caught dozens of times, if not hundreds; they simply don't get punished, except with a small fine, so they keep doing it. It's disgraceful.
> they simply don't get punished, except with a small fine, so they keep doing it. It's disgraceful.
Violent thieves (robbers) get punished. Non-violent theft is treated more lightly unless is done on a big scale. This gives criminals a high incentive to not be violent.
I have heard that the theory is that if you hard punish any thief, then thieves are going to be more violent to not get caught. If you focus the police force on violent crime, then violent crime goes down.
Most criminals know that if they give themselves in when caught, they will get a more favourable sentence that if they resist.
The goal is to keep people safe first, then property. To punish criminals is a means to that goal, but just that. I think that in the USA there is a moral component where punishing criminals is a moral imperative, even if this causes worse crime or if people get wrongly punished. Or, at least, that is what I interpret from the news.
We have a number of holes in our legal system. The cause is not what you say, even if it's very reasonable. The cause is where we came from and technical debt after so many years of patches. We suffered a dictatorship until 1975. The climate was against police and pro-reo. It was good to abolish capital punishment and other relics. But we swinged too much the other way. A more dramatic example is how people under 18 can get away with rape and murder, just a slap in the wrist. Also parole is almost a given after doing half the sentence. So effectively our longest punishment is 15 years. That has changed for rapists and terrorists, but it's basically true for most other crimes.
No it is not that. The main reason is that even if you get caught stealing you only get something like 15- 30days of jail. It is like a two week vacation for a pocket picker, then they are out again.
In SouthEastern countries they get 1, 2 or up 4 years in jail. Guess, what? There is less of them in the streets and if they are less likely to do it again.
So, being too lenient in crime creates the nightmare that Barcelona is, and draws in criminals from the rest of Europe (it is still a very beautiful city to visit).
http://documentaryheaven.com/scam-city-barcelona/
> In SouthEastern [...] there is less of them in the streets and if they are less likely to do it again.
Really? Of course only anecdotally, I've always had a worse impression of this 'street crime' in SEA than in places like Barcelona.
Romania vs Spain, Spain is clearly worse crime wise. https://www.numbeo.com/crime/compare_countries_result.jsp?co...
When you compare Bucharest (the capital city) with Barcelona, Barcelona fares a lot worse.
https://www.numbeo.com/crime/compare_cities.jsp?country1=Rom...
Index Info Bucharest | Barcelona
Crime Index: 28.48 | 45.08
Safety Scale: 71.52 | 54.92
I know, by reputation the Balkan Region doesn't look good, but when you look at the data it paints a totally different picture. My hunch is that a lot of petty thieves types have moved into Western Europe as the business is more lucrative there.
http://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/stats/Crime/Violent...
Position ... Murder rate per million
74 Romania 19.6 2009
102 Spain 8.69 2009
Your numbers are not in contradiction with my reasoning. More pretty thief is more crime, but it is less violent crime.
numbeo is a measurement of perceptions of crime, not actual crime rates. Looking at Stockholm vs. Jeddah (Saudi Arabia), Stockholm comes off the worse for safely walking at night.
Oh, apologies. I thought you meant south east Asia. I've never thought of crime in Romania.
Citations?
https://www.numbeo.com/crime/compare_countries_result.jsp?co...
Agree. I installed a Nest Camera to keep my garage and car safe...guess what: they broke into my garage anyways and all I got is a useless video of it.
Camera’s are not a solution to stop crime!
One thing I gotta say though is that it helped with figuring out what got stolen ;)
London is one of the most surveilled cities that I can think of and yet I saw or heard of people getting robbed/pickpocketed on a monthly basis.
I would argue that only more police force would help with that.
Cutting 20k police over the last few years probably hasn't helped.
I got got credit card scammed there as well by people faking being cops.
Geez that's a bummer. My wife and I are going this summer and I've been researching all of the different scams. Definitely going to get a belt wallet for me and her, it sounds like pick pocketing is the most common issue.
I did this before I relocated there for a few years. It will raise your blood pressure and you'll be trying so hard to protect yourself from one scam that you'll get hit by another, and by the time you've done researching you'll have so little trust that you might see everything as a potential robbery.
Enjoy your time there, it's a beautiful city! Just make sure to minimise your risk by limiting what you carry around with you and never take your eyes off it. That way if you do get unlucky, you can still recover from it.
Word, skateboarding has taught me to be relatively street smart and aware so I'm not _too_ worried. Can't wait to visit and thanks for the advice!
Within 5 minutes of arriving in Barcelona, a friend of mine was pickpocketed. Slick operation, 2 pretty girls as distraction and a boy to do the deed. We grabbed him and he gave it back and then the three of them just wandered off as if it was nothing. Which I suppose for them it was. This was in the main train station so there were cameras, cops around, clearly no deterrent.
My experience with Barcelona too, I witnessed a botched pickpocketing attempt just to the person next to me, when arriving to Plaza Catalunya. Way to give a bad first impression, after that the rest of the week was fine.
Why are you traveling with $10k worth of valuables? Did they steal your personal vehicle?
Apple Macbook Pro 15: $4600 (Mine) Apple Macbook Pro 13: $2600 (Wife’s) Ipad Pro: $1000 Versace Glasses: $400 Ray Ban: $300 Airpods: $250 Cash: $1300 Backpack: $150 Apple Fast Charger: $50 Fast Charging Brick: $45
The nice thing out of this incident was that I was able to transfer my Apple Care from my Apple Devices to my new replacement devices.
Camera/video equipment can add up pretty quickly.
Even nicer everyday items can quickly amount to over $500 USD. E.g. shoes (150), 3x wool socks (45), 3x dress shirts (180), jeans (100), sunglasses (150).
Sure, if you've got a huge entourage and this adds up to the order of $10k through simple multiplication of necessary items I can understand.
But if it's just a couple on vacation? Please do not create such incentives for the robbery tourists. Leave the $5k timepiece and bail money at home.
If this didn't happen to you, would you still think this way?
If you just walk in looking like a tourist to almost any metro car in barcelona people will attempt to rob you. I have never been to a place with so much blatant crime and I am from New Orleans.
https://www.worldnomads.com/travel-safety/europe/spain/barce...
The low level crime is absolutely insane in barcelona to the point I would recommend not going unless you are ready to get in shoving matches with attempted thieves.
I would absolutely recommend visiting. Barcelona is one of the most incredible cities in the world. Do a little research on the different areas. Don’t carry around 10k of valuables! And don’t leave your stuff lying around on the beach. Have an amazing time!
What the hell are you talking about. That has never been my experience nor the experience of people I know that have been there within the past 2 years. Don't fearmonger about crime.
I'm not fear mongering at all. I was there for like 3-4 days and had upwards of 3 encounters with people attempting to separate and rob my group on the metro.
That is insane. I'm not like some country bumpkin either, I am from New Orleans and so was my entire group. We didn't get robbed because we had to become physically aggressive with these groups of people and get in shoving matches and shit. It was ridiculous.
I have never experienced so much rampant theft in my life and I am fairly well traveled.
There are beautiful sights in Barcelona, but I doubt I will ever go back because it is completely lawless.
I have had gun fights happen right outside my house in New Orleans, almost everyone I know was mugged at some point growing up, there was an attempted rape in my driveway once, but it still has nothing on the volume of crime I witnessed in Barcelona.
What's that Franklin quote trading liberty for security and deserving neither? ...
> Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.
FWIW, that quote's context is far from how it's often used today.
https://www.npr.org/2015/03/02/390245038/ben-franklins-famou...
> WITTES: The exact quotation, which is from a letter that Franklin is believed to have written on behalf of the Pennsylvania General Assembly, reads, those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.
> SIEGEL: And what was the context of this remark?
> WITTES: He was writing about a tax dispute between the Pennsylvania General Assembly and the family of the Penns, the proprietary family of the Pennsylvania colony who ruled it from afar. And the legislature was trying to tax the Penn family lands to pay for frontier defense during the French and Indian War. And the Penn family kept instructing the governor to veto. Franklin felt that this was a great affront to the ability of the legislature to govern. And so he actually meant purchase a little temporary safety very literally. The Penn family was trying to give a lump sum of money in exchange for the General Assembly's acknowledging that it did not have the authority to tax it.
> SIEGEL: So far from being a pro-privacy quotation, if anything, it's a pro-taxation and pro-defense spending quotation.
> WITTES: It is a quotation that defends the authority of a legislature to govern in the interests of collective security. It means, in context, not quite the opposite of what it's almost always quoted as saying but much closer to the opposite than to the thing that people think it means.
“Now we have a big contract with Vodafone, and every month Vodafone has to give machine readable data to city hall. Before, that didn’t happen. They just took all the data and used it for their own benefit”
So, now Vodafone AND the city government has this data about the citizens. How is this fighting against surveillance? Am I missing something? :/
The funny thing about democracy is that if you have a fairly egalitarian society, the government actually represents the views of, and works for the people. So the statement you quote is saying that the people, through their democratic system of represention, has control of the data. Local power structures like local government tend to be quite good.
They have a copy, not control. Ranked from most abused to least abused, you have secret misuse and leaks, corporate misuse and leaks, and democratic misuse and leaks; and if they all get a copy you take their individual leak+misuse outputs and add them.
Metaphorically, you go from a criminal with a gun at your head to a criminal and a friend both with guns at your head.
The democratic majority is not your friend unless you are part of it. Think about anyone convicted of socially reprehensible crimes. The information that you used to be a pedophile will certainly make your life a living hell when it is used for the good of the people.
You're not. They're only improving transparency a little bit, but ultimately that same data can and will be abused by whichever government comes into power next.
I also wanted to add how deeply involved into surveillance Vodafone seems to be. I've started noticing it since some Snowden and Wikileaks revelations back. Helping governments enable surveillance on their populations seems to be kind of Vodafone's side-business.
It looks like the title is absolute clickbait-misleading-almost-lying crap.
They paid Vodafone and Vodafone used the data. "Fair enough" (so to say). No they pay Vodafone and Vodafone and they use the data. "backslash".
You are indeed missing something. The same as I am.
Fair enough, but setting the expectation of participation and transparency is a worthwhile goal in and of itself, more important that any individual failure to actually realize it.
Indeed, with "fightback" I assumed either the citizens were destroying surveillance equipment or the city prevented surveillance equipment from being installed.
Turns out it's just the government getting its piece of the cake.
The article said DECODE is an EU-funded project.
Reminded me that there's a cool monthly magazine [1] on other such projects, called Research EU. All 71 past editions are available in multiple languages, and downloadable.
The magazine "features highlights from the latest Results in Brief and project news from the world of European research and innovation" ... "where each issue covers a specific topic of interest to researchers, policymakers and other stakeholders in the research field."
1 - https://cordis.europa.eu/research-eu/home_en.html
If you see the word “smart” in front of some object, there is a strong chance it will be used against you once you have come to depend on it.
That's an interesting development but all it will take to cause damage is a reversal of the fortunes of the political party that brings this about. You always have to worry about the next government, not the current one when you start creating databases.
And that next government may decide not to honor the citizens in the same way the present one does.
It is the responsibility of the citizens to make sure the next government honors these promises, right? A good example would be the abortion policy (https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/presidential...) Every republican president reverses what the previous democratic president did, and vice versa.
If the public doesn't care enough about these issues, then how can we expect politicians to care?
The good bits are fairly closely aligned with GDPR so it will be hard for the next government to over turn.
The Catalan independence movement would be serving to overcome the apathy which would otherwise be present. A significant number of Barcelonans would be keen to limit the ability of Madrid to use information from the phone network to squash dissent.
I had come across this article before.
I just wanted to add a little update. This “direct democracy” voting system has already been put to test. The citizens voted against Colau’s party proposals. The official comment is that they “will take that into account”, but controversial plans still go forward.
If you were to ask me which city needs more surveillance, it would be Barcelona. The amount of petty crime, the constantly being approached by groups of people offering "services" and "products" is insane.
I love most cities, but that's the one place where I had a strange feeling -- I think I was afraid?
I never had any problems (or at least any worse problems than anywhere else).
I’ve had worse problems in London, which has plenty of surveillance.
I'm from there. It's not that bad, but not looking out of place helps considerably.
There's not much violent crime, so just keep your wits about you; You'll be fine :)
As a tourist or living there?
A tourist.
Everywhere else, the touristy places are well policed. Seemed the opposite in Barcelona.
All the same, the only time I didn't have that weird feeling of dread was when I went off the beaten path and away from the touristy areas.
Today I literally just finishes 2 months travelling around the area. I felt less safe in parts of France than in Barcelona.