“People at first thought they were cameras,” Morrisville Mayor TJ Cawley said. “So, people were damaging them because they didn’t want to be filmed.”
Small and boxy, these devices began to appear in public spaces across the Wake County town a few years ago. Pickleball and tennis courts. The large Church Street Park cricket ground and Cedar Fork District Park fields. Dozens are even in trash cans.
Morrisville installed these sensors in 2021, and for a year afterward, people would poke and cover them. Others went further.
Once several were damaged, local officials decided they needed to clarify what these sensors were and weren’t. Last year, the town posted a small sign beneath many that read “This is not a camera. Collects anonymous usage data.”
Like its larger neighbors Cary and Raleigh, Morrisville (population, 32,000) has invested in becoming a “smart city,” one of a growing number nationwide to embrace an emerging branch of technology to improve residents’ quality of life. Core to this movement are real-time data sensors.
At Morrisville’s tennis and pickleball courts, the sensors detect if anyone is playing. This information then goes to an online Smart City dashboard where people can check court availability from home. The same technology shows unused fields, and soon, officials plan, it will inform local swimmers of open pool lanes and runners of available elliptical equipment at the public gym. Each is intended to save people time.
Other sensors benefit residents indirectly, says Rick Ralph, Morrisville’s chief information officer. Under an initiative titled Trash Can Panda, devices analyze the fullness of around 50 community garbage bins. This allows sanitation staff to address needs when they arise rather than rely on a fixed schedule.
“We weren’t trying to change the world,” Ralph said. “We wanted to take it one step at a time. We wanted to be very intentional in the types of initiatives that we deployed.”
Ralph acknowledges there has been a learning curve.
“We dealt with vandalism quite a bit,” he said. “We tried to understand why, and I think that based on some feedback we heard — not from the actual vandals but just people with questions — that obviously they’re concerned about privacy. They’re concerned about, what is this collecting?”
Cary, Raleigh, Morrisville — ‘Everyone is using some IoT’
The need for education hasn’t been limited to Morrisville. As “smart” municipalities collect more information — from tracking traffic to measuring soil saturation — privacy questions have arisen.
“People are concerned about the government having their data,” said Tom Snyder, executive director of RIoT, a Raleigh nonprofit supporting Internet of Things.
Internet of Things, or IoT, is a network of physical objects that communicate in real time. Organizations analyze this collected data (increasingly with the help of artificial intelligence) and then display it in a digestible format.
“To some degree, everyone is using some IoT,” Snyder said.
At the new Downtown Park, the Town of Cary operates soil sensors, noise sensors, tree sensors, temperature sensors, and even beer keg sensors. Door sensors at the park’s bathroom count how many people enter while another identifies cellphones to determine how many people are nearby.
Raleigh doesn’t yet have sensors, but the capital city positions smart cameras to study traffic.
“It could help us improve the traffic flow and safety at the same time around certain intersections,” said John Holden, Raleigh’s smart city manager since 2023. “We know that certain intersections have more pedestrians because of what we’ve learned from history. We could automatically then have traffic flow to avoid interactions with more people.”
Holden insists Raleigh’s cameras do not capture license plates. And others emphasize municipalities aren’t leveraging IoT to facilitate mass surveillance.
“The reality is, we work with many local governments, state governments and so on,” Snyder said. “They are extremely careful to deploy solutions that are in the public’s interest and not capturing personal data.”
Morrisville slows down to educate
But privacy questions remain, even in one of the state’s most advanced “smart” cities.
Morrisville adopted its smart city plan in 2019 and completed its first major IoT project the following year at Cedar Fork District Park, which sits in a flood plain and gets inundated by even moderate rain. There the town installed moisture and flood sensors. It also added a digital sign at the park entrance to alert visitors of field conditions. No longer would staff need to travel to Cedar Fork to measure field saturation and post an analog sign for visitors.
“We wanted to help (employees) automate that process,” Ralph said. “Create those efficiencies so they can redirect their efforts into more meaningful impact for our residents.”
While the benefits of sensors excite many — the town’s “smart” mobile app has close to 1,000 downloads — Ralph said hearing residents’ ongoing privacy concerns led Morrisville leaders “to take a step back.”
“Not everyone in our community is part of the tech community,” he said. “So, they may not understand what IoT is or what it means.”
A few months ago, Morrisville added a subgroup within its Smart City Steering Committeeto ease doubts. Over the coming months, or even years, Ralph said the subcommittee will work to teach the community about the smart devices and the motivations behind them.
There’s proof education works. Ralph said no sensors have been vandalized since Morrisville added the explainer text.
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