Signal 4: Sidewalk Labs & Data Governance
On October 15th, Sidewalk Labs (SL) attempted to address growing concerns over its data governance strategy by releasing an official update. In their statement, they propose a development of a third party ‘Civic Data Trust’ that will control access and use of urban data generated by Quayside. Using this model, companies/agencies that want to use the data for new technologies (e.g. traffic management, ‘smart’ sensors, etc), would have to submit a Responsible Data Impact Assessment (RDIA), in which they would describe purpose of their proposal, the sources of data, the potential impact on individuals or community, and a cost/benefit analysis. These RDIA’s would be publicly available for review which SL states would increase accountability.
Though this announcement marks a large improvement on Sidewalks transparency of data governance (or lack thereof), there are many unaddressed concerns. First and foremost, who would compose the board of the Trust? Would they be elected democratically and how would they be accountable if something went wrong? Second, how will the Trust be maintained and funded? Since it would control such valuable information, I would argue that the responsibility should lay at least in part with the government. Finally, how does the Trust ensure compliance from users of the data?
Just this week, Ann Cavoukian, a chief Data Privacy adviser to SL, resigned over such privacy concerns. She stated that in a recent meetings, she was told that SL could not ensure that all data would be de-identified at source. This runs counter to many of the lofty goals made in their statement. If Waterfront Toronto is supposed to be a model for cities throughout the world, this is a major problem.
Sources:
https://www.sidewalklabs.com/blog/an-update-on-data-governance-for-sidewalk-toronto/
https://archpaper.com/2018/10/sidewalk-labs-privacy-expert-quits/
