Signal 3: The Controversy of Sidewalk Labs
Sidewalk Lab’s Quayside project is billed as “the world’s first neighborhood built from the internet up”. In other words, the digital infrastructure of the project will quantify almost every human activity with the purpose of ‘making lives easier, cheaper, and happier for Torontonians’. However, what are citizens giving up to meet those goals? This is an increasingly important question as Sidewalk Labs, Toronto Waterfront, and the city of Toronto enter the final phase of negotiations before construction.
For one, it is unclear as to how citizens data will be collected. Whether or not residents or users can ‘opt out’ of data surveillance has yet to be mentioned. Though the CEO of Sidewalk has stated that no individual persons data will be commercialized (i.e. used for advertising), data could, in theory, be aggregated for that exact purpose. In addition, nobody knows for certain who will own the data generated by Quayside. If the owner ends up being Sidewalk Labs, and by extension Alphabet (the parent company), the data may in fact be sold back to the city at the expense of the taxpayer.
In summary, there are many questions surrounding data privacy and ownership that need to be addressed in the coming months. Those involved and concerned with the commercialization of urban design would do well to attend the community meeting on October 16th.
Source: https://www.citylab.com/design/2018/09/how-smart-should-a-city-be-toronto-is-finding-out/569116/
