Participatory sensing gives a city something no fixed sensor network can: what residents themselves notice about the place they live. The method had already been shown to work in Fujisawa through MinaRepo. What it had never addressed was the private content of the reports — and open publication of citizen photographs is precisely the wrong default when those photographs carry faces, licence plates and house numbers.
SmileCityReport is a mobile application for affective participatory sensing: residents photograph city events and report on them through their phone. Rather than publishing openly, reports are shared securely within defined groups, so contributors know who is receiving what they send. The application pairs with on-device privacy protection, so sensitive content is removed before an image leaves the handset, and with an encrypted distribution framework that controls who can read a report.
Contributors could also offer their photographs for sale on the M-Sec marketplace, which connected the participatory strand directly to cross-border data exchange between Fujisawa and Santander.
– Photograph-based reporting of city events from a mobile device
– Secure sharing restricted to defined user groups
– Pairs with on-device privacy protection before upload
– Optional listing of contributed photographs on the M-Sec data marketplace
– Works across languages, though translation capability remained limited
Deployed as M-Sec Use Case 4 in Fujisawa, Japan, across three phases. The first ran at Fujisawa Jazz Meetin’ 2020 on 7 November 2020. The second, moved fully online because of the pandemic, drew 250 active users who created 1,340 posts. The third involved 40 participants from Fujisawa and Santander exchanging 46 posts between the two cities — citizens in Japan and Spain using one secure platform despite not sharing a language.
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