Opposition to Sidewalk Labs in Toronto
1–10 of 108 posts
Re: Opposition to Sidewalk Labs in Toronto
#2It looks like every (mostly useless) waterfront, science city or business park I have ever been to. Is there something new here, or is it like with many things these days that people's perception have diverged from reality?
Re: Opposition to Sidewalk Labs in Toronto
#3I think that Google should build company housing at their main facilities, give their people somewhere to live, and watch them 24/7 like lab rats.
You could accomplish an interesting experiment plus deal with the problem of giving new hires a place to live.
Re: Opposition to Sidewalk Labs in Toronto
#4To me the most of the ways that I can think of a city being smart are not related to surveillance.
If there is some system that is supposed to benefit the public then its designs should be public and subject to public approval.
What would be reasonable would be something like open source designs and protocols and maybe an electronic bidding system for projects.
But it sounds like its one company embedding whatever spy-tech they want and controlling everything over a large area behind closed doors.
I actually am really looking forward to smart cities. But smart as in high tech and advanced, not smart as in monopolistic surveillance dystopia.
Re: Opposition to Sidewalk Labs in Toronto
#5I think that Google should build company housing at their main facilities, give their people somewhere to live, and watch them 24/7 like lab rats. You could accomplish an interesting experiment plus deal with the problem of giving new hires a place to live.
That's pretty much what Google wants to do to the people they envision living in Panopticon Village, which makes the downvotes you're receiving kind of funny.
Maybe it was the suggestion that Google turn the cameras and sensors inward that triggered people?
Re: Opposition to Sidewalk Labs in Toronto
#6To me the most of the ways that I can think of a city being smart are not related to surveillance. If there is some system that is supposed to benefit the public then its designs should be public and subject to public approval. What would be reasonable would be something like open source designs and protocols and maybe an electronic bidding system for projects. But it sounds like its one company embedding whatever sp…
Pretty harsh:
> Last year, the firm's own privacy adviser Dr Ann Cavoukian resigned. "I imagined us creating a smart city of privacy, as opposed to a smart city of surveillance", she said bluntly in her resignation letter.
Re: Opposition to Sidewalk Labs in Toronto
#7To me the most of the ways that I can think of a city being smart are not related to surveillance. If there is some system that is supposed to benefit the public then its designs should be public and subject to public approval. What would be reasonable would be something like open source designs and protocols and maybe an electronic bidding system for projects. But it sounds like its one company embedding whatever sp…
I think surveillance could be part of a smart city. But for that to be smart it would have to solve the inherent problems with surveillance. An actual smart city project would proudly announce what it did to solve these challenges.
I don't see anything on their website that does this, rather it talks about how developers can enjoy access to ubiquitous connectivity [0]. This is in stark contrast to other successful initiatives like Vision Zero that started with trying to define the fundamental problems.
[0] https://sidewalktoronto.ca/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/Sidewa... [1] https://www.monash.edu/muarc/archive/our-publications/papers...
Re: Opposition to Sidewalk Labs in Toronto
#8To me the most of the ways that I can think of a city being smart are not related to surveillance. If there is some system that is supposed to benefit the public then its designs should be public and subject to public approval. What would be reasonable would be something like open source designs and protocols and maybe an electronic bidding system for projects. But it sounds like its one company embedding whatever sp…
I think surveillance could be part of a smart city. But for that to be smart it would have to solve the inherent problems with surveillance. An actual smart city project would proudly announce what it did to solve these challenges. I don't see anything on their website that does this, rather it talks about how developers can enjoy access to ubiquitous connectivity [0]. This is in stark contrast to other successful in…
Google's vision of a "smart" city is one where surveillance is the end goal, rather than a tool to improve living conditions.
Re: Opposition to Sidewalk Labs in Toronto
#9> Sidewalk Labs, a sister company to Google, had acquired disused land in Toronto, Canada for this bold urban experiment
"Disused land" is a bit disingenuous. Toronto real estate prices are very high right now and this is waterfront property. It's former industrial land we're hoping to revitalize.
As far as I can tell, Google isn't doing us a favor here. They're just another developer trying to make a bunch of money off of our huge need for additional housing. They choose to make this money via surveillance and advertising, and increasing demand by promising some neat tech benefits.
But if they weren't here, that land would still be developed. Probably sooner. (And probably by a developer making money by cutting every corner in the build).
Re: Opposition to Sidewalk Labs in Toronto
#10The opposition to this is not just from the privacy perspective, there's also the issue of data ownership, and giving all this data away to Google for free. And once it's owned, both cities and citizens lose all control and oversight - you can't get yourself removed from the dataset, impose restrictions on how this personal data will be used, etc.
There are some good quotes in this older Reuters story (https://www.reuters.com/article/us-canada-cities-privacy-fea...):
> The proposal amounts to “permanent surveillance” and “massive data scraping” under the guise of fighting climate change, he said. “They are conducting an experiment in real time, in the real world: the privatization of our cities on a large scale. They will have intellectual property rights over all of this (data).”
> “We live in a system that values property rights,” Orasch told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. “In that system, data is a valuable asset for an individual to have.”
And the developer asking for investment money and a cut of property taxes, on top of gathering all this private data and owning it forever without oversight, is just icing on the cake. :)