Hundreds of cities, large and small, have adopted or begun planning smart cities projects. But the risks are daunting. Experts say cities frequently lack the expertise to understand privacy, security and financial implications of such arrangements. Some mayors acknowledge that they have yet to master the responsibilities that go along with collecting billions of bits of data from residents.

Concerns have intensified as Kansas City prepares to expand its technology experiment from downtown to poor neighborhoods on the city’s East Side. The expansion will bring free wireless to homes, but also dozens of surveillance cameras and a gunshot detection system, and some residents worry that in the quest to be seen as forward thinking, the city may be handing off too much control to private companies and opening up residents to consequences it doesn’t fully understand.

“We increasingly see every problem as a technology-related problem, so the solution is more technology,” said Ben Green, a Harvard University graduate student who studies cities and technology. “And you have cities, which are caught in this devil’s bargain, where they feel they don’t have the resources to provide the services people need, and so they make these deals with tech companies that have money, but which in the long term might not be beneficial to either them or their residents.”

In Seattle, officials this year began to dismantle a network of surveillance cameras and wireless devices that the police had deemed vital in fighting crime, but that drew complaints over the network’s ability to track cellphones.

