Earlier this year, Toronto announced the construction of a new development in the heart of the city’s waterfront area. This announcement puts the final nail in the coffin of Google and Sidewalk Labs arm to turn the neighborhood into a “smart city” filled with surveillance technology to monitor residents’ every move.
MIT Technology Review reported in February that the City of Toronto announced plans for new development along the waterfront. The project will consist of 800 low-cost apartments, a two-hectare forest, a roofed farm, a new arts facility and a zero carbon commitment. But Sidewalk Labs, Google’s smart city division, has claimed the same 12-acre plot known as Quayside that Toronto plans to use for new green development. Google plans to build a “smart city” along the coast, and its proposal was accepted in October 2017 by the government agency Waterfront Toronto, which oversees the redevelopment of 2,000 hectares of lakeshore.
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Sidewalk Labs offers a vibrant tech hub with an optimized urban layout, including robotic taxis, heated sidewalks, autonomous garbage collection, and a digital monitoring layer that will track everything from street crossings to park bench use.
If development continues, it will be a proof of concept for a new development model that Sidewalk Labs hopes to expand to cities in Canada and the United States. The aim is to prove that the same sensor smart city model adopted in countries such as China and the Persian Gulf can be used in more democratic societies.
Instead, Sidewalk Labs spent two and a half years creating a neighborhood no one wanted to live in. By May 2020, Sidewalk Labs closed the project, citing “economic uncertainty caused by the covid-19 pandemic”. But the cancellation also comes after years of debate over his $900 million vision for a data-rich, constantly monitored city.
In 2018, Breitbart News reported that a privacy expert left the project:
According to Gizmodo, Ann Kavukian, a former privacy broker from Ontario and a consultant for Sidewalk Labs, a Google-owned company that aims to build a smart city in Toronto, has left the project. Kavukyan was hired to join the project as a consultant, but recently submitted a resignation letter saying, “I thought we were building a Smart Privacy City, not a Smart Surveillance City.”
In 2017, Waterfront Toronto enlisted the support of Sidewalk Labs, a subsidiary of Google’s parent company Alphabet, to develop a smart city plan for the Quayside area. As part of this development, Kavukyan developed a plan called “Privacy by Design” to protect the data privacy of smart city residents. But the smart city has faced increasing levels of criticism since its announcement.
Jim Balsillie, the former CEO of Blackberry, described the development in a recent article as “an experiment in colonization under capitalism, trying to override important urban, civic and political issues.” Kavukyan said his departure from the project should be a “strong statement” about the violation of user data privacy.
Alex Ryan, Senior Vice President, Partner Solutions, MaRS Discovery District, said: “Life in the US is freedom and the pursuit of happiness. Canada has peace, order and good government. Canadians don’t expect the private sector to come and bail us out because we trust the government so much.”
Read more at MIT Technology Review here.
Source: Breitbart
