**4. Some Words of Caution**

Although these developments can have enormous societal and technological benefits, they also raise security, privacy, legal, and ethical concerns [25].

The increased dependency of water utilities on ICT to carry out their mission and functions, as well as the tendency to provide interoperability and connect these traditionally closed systems to the Internet, opens them up to, as ye<sup>t</sup> unheard of, cyber threats. A case in point is Maroochy Water Services in Australia, probably the most well-known cyber-attack in the water sector, where over a three-month period in 2000 a disgruntled former contractor took control of over 150 sewage pumping stations and released one million litres of untreated sewage into the environment [119]. Furthermore, the prospect of a large number of smart water meters being installed at customer homes, thus connecting them to the utility ICT systems, raises also a possibility of the wider water infrastructure becoming vulnerable to scalable network-borne attacks.

By the very nature of smart systems, customers adopting them share detailed information about their water usage with the utility, which is then used to better assess the demand and manage the entire system. This information sharing potentially exposes customers to privacy invasions with the main concern being the limited control over personal data by an individual, which can result in a range of negative or unintended consequences. Legal considerations relating to privacy and data protection with respect to services or applications created using customer water usage data (particularly valuable when combined with personal data), has been given insufficient attention in the literature [120]. It is, therefore, positive that the new EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) [121] provides a framework for data protection and privacy for citizens. The regulation deals with the risks of accidental or unlawful destruction, loss, alteration, unauthorized disclosure of, or access to, personal data transmitted, stored or otherwise processed. The regulation's application will inevitably open up new questions and challenges which will need to be addressed, but it is important that this conversation is progressing.

Last, but certainly not least, smart systems as surveillance-enabled technologies as well as AI-based decision making, raise issues of privacy, fundamental rights, ethics and responsibility in technological innovation [122]. The need for rethinking, spelling out and agreeing upon the ethical principles on which these technologies is expected to be based [123] has never been more pressing. This is a challenge, not only for technology (and the safeguards it needs to put in place) but perhaps more importantly for ethics and the humanities that need to pick up the challenge and update their theories, methods, vocabulary and technology to make sense of and proactively manage the potential implications to society from a pace of technological development never seen before.

### **5. Conclusions: A Bright Future with Some Caveats**

This study has presented a summary of the dynamic evolution of hydroinformatics, as a discipline at the interface between water science, data science, computer science and technology on the one hand and society on the other. In so doing, the authors have highlighted exciting advances in new real-time information; new analytics developed to extract value from this new information; novel whole cycle (socio-technical) system models that are calibrated on these new datasets; new more immersive approaches to decision support; more sophisticated ways of stress-testing new and existing cyber-physical infrastructure to improve its resilience. Four activity lines of research have also been proposed, coming up on the horizon (tapping into the new data landscape; getting more out of existing models; planning for more resilient systems and services; training, engaging and communicating). The authors sugges<sup>t</sup> that these activity lines support a virtuous cycle towards more resilient water systems and services. It is further argued that their confluence can drastically change both the form and function of water services and the infrastructure that provide these services in the not too distant future—for the better—provided that important challenges around privacy, fundamental rights, ethics and responsibility in technological innovation are seriously and urgently addressed.

**Author Contributions:** Conceptualization, C.M. and D.A.S.; methodology, C.M.; investigation, C.M. and D.A.S.; resources, C.M. and D.A.S.; data curation, C.M. and D.A.S.; writing—original draft preparation, C.M.; writing—review and editing, C.M. and D.A.S.; supervision, D.A.S.

**Funding:** This research received no external funding.

**Conflicts of Interest:** The authors declare no conflict of interest.
