Sean Craig, a journalist, noticed that dozens of Twitter bots (these 30+ fake accounts are just a fraction of them) have started posting identical pro-Google/Sidewalk Labs posts recently. All of the account bios state that they are privacy or cybersecurity experts, which is obviously a complete joke. For what it’s worth, Sidewalk Labs denied that they are involved in this mess.
A list of links to some of these accounts is under the cut in case anyone has some time on their hands and wants to report them.
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).”
To finance its expanded vision, Google’s Sidewalk Labs wants a share of the property taxes, development fees and increased value of city land that would normally go to the city, the Star has learned.
Google’s futuristic development on the eastern waterfront, Quayside, is only the first step in an expansive and ambitious plan to build new neighbourhoods — and new transit — throughout the entire Port Lands, the Star has learned.
In return for its investment in this vision, Sidewalk Labs wants a share of the property taxes, development fees and increased value of city land that would normally go to city coffers.
Internal documents obtained by the Star show Sidewalk Labs plans to make the case that it is “entitled to … a share in the uptick in land value on the entire geography ... a share of developer charges and incremental tax revenue on all land.”
Known internally as the ‘yellow book,’ 437-page report from 2016 describes life in a Sidewalk neighbourhood such as Toronto’s proposed Quayside site as an experience based, in part, on how much data people are willing to share
A confidential Sidewalk Labs document from 2016 lays out the founding vision of the Google-affiliated development company, which included having the power to levy its own property taxes, track and predict people’s movements and control some public services.
The document, which The Globe and Mail has seen, also describes how people living in a Sidewalk community would interact with and have access to the space around them – an experience based, in part, on how much data they’re willing to share, and which could ultimately be used to reward people for “good behaviour.”
Known internally as the “yellow book,” the document was designed as a pitch book for the company, and predates Sidewalk’s relationship and formal agreements with Toronto by more than a year. Peppered with references to Disney theme parks and noted futurist Buckminster Fuller, it says Sidewalk intended to “overcome cynicism about the future.”
[...]
To carry out its vision and planned services, the book states Sidewalk wanted to control its area much like Disney World does in Florida, where in the 1960s it “persuaded the legislature of the need for extraordinary exceptions.” This could include granting Sidewalk taxation powers. “Sidewalk will require tax and financing authority to finance and provide services, including the ability to impose, capture and reinvest property taxes,” the book said. The company would also create and control its own public services, including charter schools, special transit systems and a private road infrastructure.
[...]
Data collection plays a central role throughout the book. Early on, the company notes that a Sidewalk neighbourhood would collect real-time position data “for all entities” – including people. The company would also collect a “historical record of where things have been" and "about where they are going.” Furthermore, unique data identifiers would be generated for “every person, business or object registered in the district,” helping devices communicate with each other.
There would be a quid pro quo to sharing more data with Sidewalk, however. The document describes a tiered level of services, where people willing to share data can access certain perks and privileges not available to others. Sidewalk visitors and residents would be "encouraged to add data about themselves and connect their accounts, either to take advantage of premium services like unlimited wireless connectivity or to make interactions in the district easier,” it says.
Samantha Edwards writes at NOW Toronto about the controversy surrounding the visit of transphobe author Meghan Murphy to give a speech at the Palmerston library, with authors even threatening a boycott of the network.
Natasha Tusikov writes at The Conversation about how Sidewalk Labs’ proposals for the Port Lands would give it great and unaccountable political power.
We all collectively see cities as about friction: good friction and bad friction... Good friction is serendipity, it’s opportunity, it’s diversity, it’s seeing 40 different nationalities on the subway as you commute in the morning. Bad friction is congestion, it’s pollution.
Project with Google’s Sidewalk Labs comes under increasing scrutiny amid concerns over privacy and data harvesting
A “smart city” project in Canada has hit yet another snag, as mounting delays and privacy concerns threaten the controversial development along the Toronto’s eastern waterfront.
The 12-acre Quayside project, a partnership between Google’s Sidewalk Labs and the city of Toronto, has come under increasing scrutiny amid concerns over privacy and data harvesting.
This week, the US venture capitalist Roger McNamee warned that technology companies such as Google cannot be trusted to safely manage the data they collect on residents.
“The smart city project on the Toronto waterfront is the most highly evolved version to date of … surveillance capitalism”, he wrote to the city council, suggesting Google will use “algorithms to nudge human behavior” in ways to “favor its business”.
McNamee, an early investor in Facebook and Google, is co-founder of Silver Lake Partners, one of the world’s largest technology investors.
But in recent years, he has soured on many of the technology giants and their handling of data and privacy concerns.
“No matter what Google is offering, the value to Toronto cannot possibly approach the value your city is giving up,” he wrote, pleading with officials to abandon the project. “It is a dystopian vision that has no place in a democratic society.”
The battle against Big Tech has now decisively emerged as a new front in the fight for the right to the city – Activists kicked Amazon’s HQ2 out of New York City. They ran Google’s new campus out of Berlin. Now, in Toronto, #BlockSidewalk wants to send Google – and their new “smart city” – packing. The battle against Big Tech is emerging as the new front in the fight for the right to the city.
It was the most unusual town hall Toronto had seen in years. Even after the venue was moved to a 498-seat theatre to accommodate demand, registration filled up almost a week in advance and the rush lineup stretched around the corner. Yes, a rush lineup. For a community town hall. At the first Sidewalk Toronto Community Town Hall on November 1, 2017, the municipal was sexy again.
Inside, a veritable who’s who of Toronto’s urbanist, policy wonk, political, innovation, tech, and start-up scenes milled about. There was a hum of excitement as everyone prepared to hear about Sidewalk Labs’ vision for “the neighbourhood of the future.” And outside the glass walls of the St. Lawrence Centre for the Arts, activists from Toronto ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, a national organization of low- and moderate-income families) chanted slogans in support of affordable housing.
From the very beginning, Sidewalk Labs’ venture has been marked by protest. The project to build a so-called “smart city” on Toronto’s eastern waterfront has attracted considerable controversy and criticism since it was announced during a 2017 press conference featuring the prime minister, Justin Trudeau, and Eric Schmidt, the chairman of Sidewalk’s parent company, Alphabet. The project to be built at Quayside, a 12-acre slice of mostly undeveloped land, is unprecedented in its vision. Never before have so many elements of urban techno-utopia been assembled together in quite this fashion, at least in North America: self-driving vehicles, underground waste-disposal robots, “dynamic streets” with road markings that change depending on the time of the day, digital electricity systems. Given that Sidewalk Labs is a sister company to Google, the first set of concerns centred around data, privacy, and surveillance. Over the last year and a half, as the process has unfolded, a far more familiar yet even more complex set of concerns has emerged: governance, privatization, and gentrification.
The primary innovation in this project hasn’t been a smart device that improves the quality of urban life; it’s been the private-public-private partnership between Sidewalk Labs and Waterfront Toronto, itself a quasi-public corporation with limited accountability. The agreement, first signed in October 2017 and updated in July 2018, converts the role of Sidewalk from vendor to partner, with a wide-ranging mandate for issues such as economic development, housing affordability, environmental sustainability, and – perhaps most dangerously – privacy and data governance. In effect, this means that Sidewalk is helping develop the policies to which it is itself subject. This goes beyond a mere conflict of interest to a case of regulatory capture, where a private actor amasses considerable influence in directing the nature and function of regulations that should only be established through a public and democratically accountable process.
