Smart cities are cities that integrate digital infrastructures to provide more efficient or new services to their citizens. One example of such initiatives was imagined by Sidewalk Labs, an affiliate from Google, for the city of Toronto under the name Quayside. This initiative aimed to develop a city that considers the 9th following dimensions: Google’s vision of a city, an “internet-first” community, a technology playground, a fully integrated public transportation system, social housing that is also desirable, a new Canadian Google headquarters, 44,000 jobs, a green city initiative, and a public-private partnership on data. All those dimensions assured huge advantages for the city of Toronto and its citizens. However, even though the advantages of Quayside were very promising, this initiative was canceled on the 7th of May 2020. What are the reasons to justify this cancellation?
Case
According to the CEO of Sidewalk, the reason behind this abandonment is due to the “unprecedented economic uncertainty has set in around the world and in the Toronto real estate market, it has become too difficult to make the 12-acre project financially viable without sacrificing core parts of the plan we had developed”. However, according to many dissidents to the project, one of the main issues related to the initiative was the problem of data privacy. Indeed, to guarantee the viability of the initiative, a large amount of data from the citizens need to be gathered and processed. Sensors, cameras, connected houses, and many other IoT were supposed to be used to allow the overall ecosystem to operate efficiently. This, however, would have come at the cost of privacy rights and the destruction of the personal sphere.
Many concerns were raised since it meant that Sidewalk had access to a large amount of personal data on the inhabitants, which could raise many democratic and legal issues. For instance, Jim Balsillie, the co-founder of BlackBerry maker Research, called this project “a colonizing experiment in surveillance capitalism attempting to bulldoze important urban, civic and political issues”. The issue of data privacy is not something that should be taken lightly, and the companies and government have a role in assuring that users are aware of the data they are sharing. Sidewalk was aware of this importance since they tried to address the concerns of the dissidents by assuring their transparency and their good intentions.
It, however, failed to reassure anyone and the lack of trust in Sidewalk undermined any possible development. The following aspects, especially, were not transparent enough. First, the importance of anonymizing data from users. According to a Sidewalk consultant, Sidewalk didn’t assure that third parties involved will have to follow this principle. Second, Sidewalk proposed to create an independent trust to manage the data. Critics, however, were not convinced by the design, and not enough information about the data plan was provided. Third, according to Canadian laws, Sidewalk was not forced to store data locally, making it a risk of international access. Finally, dissidents were afraid that Alphabet, the owner of Sidewalk would have access to too precise information and it would come at the costs of the customers.
Conclusion
Smart-cities could provide solutions to many social and environmental challenges. But, for the moment, there is a lot of grey areas related to their development, especially connected to data privacy rights. Companies who want to invest in this new industry will have to carefully earn the trust of the citizens and other stakeholders, to be sure that they are willing to share their data with them.
References
https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2020/05/13/9-things-we-lost-when-google-canceled-its-smart-cities-project-in-toronto/#3b39dd8435bf
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/may/07/google-sidewalk-labs-toronto-smart-city-abandoned
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/toronto/article-sidewalk-labs-quayside-toronto-waterfront-explainer/
Hey Deborah. While reading the introduction to your blog, I thought that Quayside sounded like a very exciting initiative. But after reading the entire blog, I can definitely see why the project was cancelled. Although there’s a ton of advantages, including the massive job creation, I think Sidewalk completely disregarded the privacy concerns. The four aspects you mentioned that lacked in transparency, I thought were quite obvious and would be upsetting to me as well if I were to be interested in living in Quayside.
I like that you mentioned some lessons that new players in this industry should take from the failure of Quayside. And I agree that transparency surrounding privacy policy is more important than ever, and companies should be way more attentive to this than Sidewalk was with this project.