Sidewalk Labs would have turned a large plot of Toronto’s public land into a private lab for data collection. Cities need better digital governance to protect against such attempts.
“The document was, in effect, calling for the outsourcing of public governance to a for-profit actor. It’s difficult to believe the document even passed legal muster—that lawyers paid with public money approved it. But it speaks to an important policy problem: many things related to digital public governance are currently legal by default—not because they should be, but because rules haven’t kept pace with the tech industry or are being cowritten by it through lobbying. As a result, through public technology procurements, governments continually conflate growing the tech sector (economic development) with being consumed by it (outsourcing and automating public governance).”
