# On Transparency and Accountability of Smart Assistants in Smart Cities
## 6 Discussion  
In smart cities, whose architectural technologies will be involved in collecting, analyzing, and using data for their operations, new privacy and security challenges will arise [75; 76; 77; 78]. Transparency in the design, implementation, and operations of smart city products can ensure establishing private and secure personal spaces for the citizens by enabling their validation and accountability. This becomes especially sensitive when the products in question serve the needs of hundreds of millions of users across borders and even of those who are vulnerable. Previous research identifies a lack in the transparency of operations of predictive algorithms used in some smart city infrastructures [2; 36]. However, their impact is limited to the cities where these systems operate. Likewise, different works identify security and privacy issues in smart assistants [26; 27; 50; 51]. Nevertheless, previous works on the privacy and security of smart assistants focus on vulnerabilities in their implementation. Current work contributes to the research on the transparency of smart city products and smart assistants. It identifies a lack of transparency in the risk communication of a state-of-the-art smart assistant and its implementation through diagnostic analysis. It explains the implications of this lack of transparency from an accountability perspectiveand for the privacy protection of its potential users, i.e., the smart city inhabitants, through two user studies conducted with students of four universities in three countries. The findings of this research become particularly important since the use of smart assistants is on the rise in smart cities [18; 19]. In addition to general-purpose smart assistants, special-purpose smart assistants are increasingly being designed to be used by people with special needs, in the classrooms, and for the elderly [14; 15]. Moreover, the number of minors using smartphones is increasing and introducing different issues [79; 80]. Because most of the popular smart assistants have smartphone versions, we can imply that minors will use a large number of generic (e.g., GA) and special-purpose smart assistants (e.g., educational smart assistants). Consequently, the responsibility of risk assessment and management of these products falls on experts, designers, developers, and regulatory bodies. Towards this end, as mentioned in above, GDPR requires data controllers to transparently communicate the risks of their products and services to users. Considering the case of GA, Google has provided a list of permissions and described their role in data and feature protection in Android phones; Read Google Service (READ_GSERVICES) is not on that list [37]. The only information available on this permission says that it lets an app read the configuration of Google services [81]. However, this explanation comes from an unofficial source and sheds no light on the nature and scope of this permission. We infer that Google has failed to transparently communicate the risks of this particular permission to the users of GA. The lack of transparency in risk communication is supposed to affect the privacy protection of the users of this smart assistant. The results of our user studies confirm that the respondents failed to perceive the risks of GA, which validates a failure on the part to Google to convey risks of this product effectively to its potential users. Since risk communication is a fundamental condition for informed consent [82], a question mark can be put on the validity of consent gained using means such as the undocumented permission in GA. The legality and fairness of operations of this smart assistant should also be assessed. However, we leave this to legal experts and researchers. As the results of this research suggest, a lack of transparency in the implementation of GA leads to the lack of explainability and therefore affects its validation and accountability. We observe that many risk evaluation models turn ineffective in this regard.