Are smart cities smart enough?
Data. As enthusiasts and students of science, we have a great belief and trust in data. More data, better catalogued data, more expertly analyzed data, can help us solve so many problems.
That’s why talk of smart cities gets us data freaks twitching. Canada was one of the countries that took the lead in this area by announcing a plan to develop a section of Toronto as a “smart city” test site, and the kickoff date is approaching.
If your passion is blockchain, you think of smart delivery of services as a perfect application. Whether it’s providing more efficient municipal buses and traffic control, helping to manage autonomous vehicles, delivering the internet, collecting the trash, or speeding emergency vehicles where they are needed, we can all spin proposals where transparency, with untraceable input, is an ideal approach.
Toronto takes a leap
The ideal approach doesn’t appear to be the one that the company in Toronto is employing. Sidewalk Labs, which has contracts with more than a dozen cities now, will be collecting information in Flow, Alphabet’s cloud software. What’s even more concerning to many is, Sidewalk Labs itself is owned by Alphabet. Which means it’s linked to Google.
If you are unconcerned because you look forward to heated sidewalks that melt ice, and greener buildings that reduce greenhouse gases, and don’t mind a city where surveillance is the norm, you will feel right at home. Many reason that “Google knows everything about me anyway.” The fact is, they are about to have access to a whole lot more. Thousands of cameras and sensors will fuel the system, and civil libertarians are growing anxious. In fact, The Canadian Civil Liberties Association has filed a suit to block the project based on privacy concerns.
You can stay out, but not opt out
While certain social platforms allow us to “opt out” of some data mining, and we have gotten used to that “we use cookies” screen to let us know we are somewhere online where our presence has been noted, residents and visitors to Quayside in Toronto will have no way to consent to their participation in the experiment.
A spokesperson for Sidewalk Labs told NPR that the concerns are unfounded, because “That’s just not the business we’re in.” That may be so. For now. Possibly forever. Who knows? Company policies change. Companies can be subject to political influence. Data is precious, possibly the most precious commodity on earth today. Taking a peak at it could prove to be irresistible.
But the other issue is, we are being asked to trust a third party, again. In an era where we know how to avoid that vulnerability, for a project that is being built from the ground up, and at a time when hacking is an increasingly fine art, we are watching a new venture launch that will once again rely on a central database.
AI can be tricked
So while as tech lovers we might be salivating, reflecting on who’s got the data and what they’re doing with it gets us citizens sweating just a bit, too. Not to mention realizing we need solutions to the pranksters out to prove the AI wrong, such as the artist who tricked Google into thinking there was a traffic jam by dragging around a wagon full of cell phones, or the researchers who got a self-driving car to accelerate to 85 by doctoring a 35 mph traffic sign with electrical tape. You’d like to think good old human intelligence would have been preferable in each circumstance.
In so many ways, Flow is a brilliant concept. Gathering real-time data and combining it with information known to municipalities and to the U.S. Department of Transportation to make better decisions about traffic control sounds like Jetson’s era technology. But since this is being built from scratch, why not focus on what’s important? You need to know I’m there. You don’t need to know it’s me.
It’s not like blockchain involvement in smart cities is unknown. There are already many projects worldwide in the proposal or development stage. We can do this. Today. For now, inception of the Toronto project has been delayed to allow for more comment.
Looking at any street view in Google maps at all the blurred out faces and license plate numbers tells us Google has the technology to keep our identities secure. The question you have to ask is, Why don’t they just offer that to us?
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