# On Transparency and Accountability of Smart Assistants in Smart Cities
## 1 Introduction
According to recital 78 of GDPR, such ease of access, enhanced understanding, and the use of visualization aids is of particular importance \"where the proliferation of actors and the technological complexity of practice make it difficult for the data subject to know and understand whether, by whom and for what purpose personal data relating to him or her are being collected, such as in the case of online advertising\". Recital 100 provides that the purpose of setting such conditions of transparency is to help data subjects \"quickly assess the level of data protection of relevant products and services\". Article 5 of the GDPR associates transparency with accountability. Smart Assistants have rapidly emerged in smartphones, vehicles, and many smart home devices. From serving people with special needs in smart homes to solving problems in the classrooms and from assisting in finding directions to entertaining people, they have a variety of uses [14; 15; 16; 17]. The most common form of these smart assistants has emerged in smartphones. Hundreds of millions of smartphone devices have been shipped with these smart assistants [18]. It is estimated that, by 2023, there will be 8 billion smart assistants in the world [19]. These smart assistants are taking diverse roles and positions in our lives. Google Assistant (GA) is embedding in phones, speakers, smart display, cars, TVs, laptops, smartwatches, and many more devices [20]. Amazon wants its smart assistant, Alexa, to perceive the lives of people and shape them [21]. The potential impact of smart assistants on the lives of smart city inhabitants reflects in findings of a recent report published by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), which says that AI and the digital assistants that it powers are ushering humanity into an era that portends changes as deep, expansive, personal, and long-lasting as those that grew out of the industrial revolution [22]. The modus operandi of these smart assistants, that is, collecting, analyzing, and using data of their users and the nature of assignments that they perform, makes them sensitive from privacy and security point of view. It is the responsibility of developers of these smart assistants to consider the requirements of establishing private and secure user spaces in smart cities. However, recent research discoversnumerous privacy and security issues in these smart assistants, and their design flaws are introducing unforeseen problems in daily life. Vulnerabilities in their underlying mechanisms are found to put the privacy of their users and security of the devices at stake, and their mysterious behaviors are raising trust issues [23; 24; 25; 26]. One of the key solutions to addressing these issues can be introducing transparency in data collection behaviors and operations of these smart assistants [27]. However, recent reports question the transparency of how some of these smart assistants work [28]. Nevertheless, there is not much work that investigates transparency issues in smart assistants and studies their impact on the privacy protections of users and the accountability of these systems. Our recent work finds transparency issues in Google Assistant (GA) [29]. However, the primary focus of that work is on identifying privacy and security issues in Android smartphones due to the integration of AI in these devices, where it uses smart assistants as a case study. Therefore, its findings of transparency issues in smart assistants are only secondary. This work extends our previous research in [29] with the purpose to demonstrate the importance of the role of transparency in the design of smart assistants and find its impact on their accountability and privacy protection of smart city citizens. For this purpose, we take the case of GA, a state-of-the-art smart assistant, and perform its diagnostic analysis to assess the transparency of its risk communication to its potential users and implementation.