Public Perception and Adoption of Smart City Crime Prevention Technologies in Kuwait: A Study Based on UTAUT and Privacy Calculus Theory

The rapid integration of smart city technologies has revolutionized urban safety, introducing tools such as AI-driven surveillance, predictive policing systems, and IoT-enabled devices to combat crime more effectively. This paper analyzes the public perception of technology and the factors that promote adoption of crime fighting tools within Kuwait’s smart cities, through the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT) model and the Privacy Calculus Theory. A quantitative research design was utilized where a questionnaire was distributed to 400 respondents out of which 351 were deemed valid for analysis. The collected information was processed using a combination of multinomial and ordinal logistic regression models to determine the impacts of specific variables such as performance expectancy, effort expectancy, social influence, facilitating conditions, privacy concerns, and trust in government on behavioral intention (BIU) and use behavior (UB). Findings indicate that privacy concerns negatively influence BIU, performance expectancy has partial positive effects and facilitating conditions and trust in government have limited impact. The results validate the UTAUT model within the vertical of social privacy, whereas also advancing it, thus supporting the growing literature on the subject matter, promoting the need for good governance. Urban planners in collaboration with the facility`s management in smart cities and the crime prevention government agencies can make use of these to better the concepts and deployment of smart crime control systems that meet the expectations of citizens and better trust and acceptance of these technologies. These findings contribute to both theory and practice by highlighting the key factors that influence technology adoption with regards to crime prevention in smart cities in Kuwait.