Responsible Data Use Digitale Gracht

The Digitale Gracht (Dutch for Digital Canal) is a traffic monitoring system operating on Amsterdam's inland waterways. The system serves to support policy development, management of the waterways and monitoring and enforcement on the water. The Digitale Gracht, initially developed by Waternet, and since 2020 owned by the municipality of Amsterdam, has recently become a subject of scrutiny within the municipal operations in discussions on public values. While some of the system's features proved to be valuable in monitoring the waterways, its design has sparked concerns within the municipality and has prompted the ICT team of the “Programma Varen” to act by deactivating several functionalities of the Digitale Gracht. A comprehensive re-evaluation has become necessary to address the growing questions surrounding the Digitale Gracht's alignment with the municipality's digitalisation objectives.

This report presents the outcome of an investigation aiming to evaluate and propose alternatives to the Digitale Gracht system and the related “binnenhavengeld” (Dutch for inner harbor fees; also known as BHG) payment process carried out by the Responsible Sensing Lab in collaboration with experts from the Delft University of Technology (TU Delft) on request of the “Programma Varen.” The investigation focused on identifying issues and proposing alternatives based on non-statutory norms (in Dutch “bovenwettelijke normen”) with a specific emphasis on responsibility and proportionality. The term 'responsible' encompasses the degree to which relevant public values, outlined in Amsterdam's policy documents, including the Digital city agenda, Amsterdam data strategy, and coalition agreement, have been conscientiously considered in the operation of this socio-technical system. Proportionality, on the other hand, revolves around the examination of the relationship between the system's goals and the methods used to reach these goals.

This investigation is confined to the current state of the Digitale Gracht system (September to December 2023) and concrete proposals for changes to systems that are in development or have been tested in the past. Additionally, the scope extends to the examination of the relation with the BHG payment process. The BHG payment process was included in the scope of this investigation, although it is not formally integrated into the Digitale Gracht system, as it relies partially on the same technological foundations and is described in a single shared privacy statement.

This report is structured as follows. Section 2 introduces the approaches employed in this investigation. Section 3 presents an outline of the Digitale Gracht system. Section 4 introduces the BHG payment process. Section 5 lists the identified issues and corresponding recommendations for alternative solutions. Section 6 concludes the report presenting potential follow-up projects to further develop some of the most promising alternatives recommended in the previous section.