Your cellphone knows when you are sleeping. It knows when you’re awake. It knows where you’ve been and it sends all that information to Google.
As Toronto contemplates allowing the American tech behemoth to build one of the world’s first “smart neighbourhoods” on the eastern waterfront, details have emerged of how Google proposes to collect and commodify data collected from millions of cellphones — and sell it to government.
Sidewalk Labs is promising it won’t control data collected in the public spaces of a “smart city” proposed for Toronto’s waterfront — and says it wants to see a public trust created to take charge of such data.
Amid a growing controversy over data collection, control and privacy, Manhattan-based Sidewalk Labs Monday released its 41-page Digital Governance Proposals, a draft report it hopes will quell concerns pertaining to a proposed 12-acre technology-driven neighbourhood on a parcel of land in the Queens Quay and Parliament St. area called Quayside.
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https://www.engadget.com/2018/10/26/sidewalk-labs-ann-cavoukian-smart-city/
Sidewalk Labs, an Alphabet division focused on smart cities, is caught in a battle over information privacy. The team has lost its lead expert and consultant, Ann Cavoukian, over a proposed data trust that would approve and manage the collection of information inside Quayside, a conceptual smart neighborhood in Toronto. Cavoukian, the former information and privacy commissioner for Ontario, disagrees with the current plan because it would give the trust power to approve data collection that isn’t anonymized or “de-identified” at the source. “I had a really hard time with that,” she told Engadget. “I just couldn’t… I couldn’t live with that.”
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Sidewalk Labs CEO Dan Doctoroff says his firm will act as a “catalyst” to help develop and deliver the infrastructure upon which the Quayside neighbourhood will be based.
In a speech Wednesday to a newly formed advisory panel of Canadian executives and urban experts, brought together to provide advice to Sidewalk Labs on proposed plans for a 12-acre technology-driven project on Toronto’s eastern waterfront, Doctoroff said the project will feature shared automated vehicles, streets that melt snow and redirect traffic in real time, an advanced electrical grid and “next-generation” stormwater management.
Saadia Muzaffar
Toronto, Ontario
October 04, 2018
Waterfront Toronto, and my fellow Digital Strategy Advisory Panel members,
It is with deep dismay and profound concern that I am resigning from Waterfront Toronto’s
Digital Strategy Advisory Panel, effective today.
When I was asked to join the panel, my hope with this esteemed group of experts and
city-builders was that we would be able to provide Waterfront Toronto with our advice on how to
best engage in this high-potential and complex opportunity, and to help them gauge whether or
not the proposed package of solutions from Sidewalk Labs is a sound and prudent deal in the
short and long term for the City of Toronto and its residents.
In the last eleven months of the (now) approximately fifteen month consultation period,
Waterfront Toronto’s apathy and utter lack of leadership regarding shaky public trust and social
license has been astounding. There is a growing list of squandered opportunities to take
ownership of the narrative that would clarify the boundaries between who is in charge of how
this “partnership” unfolds; bewildering for a public corporation that has historically done such a
thorough job of bridging with the public by truthfully engaging them in co-design and responding
to their concerns and advice regarding the development of Toronto’s waterfront. And while a
“smart city” venture might be new for Waterfront Toronto, we have example after example from
New York, Seattle, and Westminster in the UK, to name but a few, of the lessons learned from
Alphabet/Sidewalk Labs’ foray into selling tech solutions to cities, and the resulting serious
reservations put forth by those standing up to safeguard public interest.
My gravest concern is that while the panel is showing up in good faith, I have yet to see
evidence that Waterfront Toronto shares the urgency and concern that has been raised in
multiple fora – as evident through how the public meetings continue to be run, who is running
them, and what is consistently left unsaid and unaddressed. The most recent public roundtable
in August displayed a blatant disregard for resident concerns about data and digital
infrastructure. Time was spent instead talking about buildings made out of wood and the width
of one-way streets, things no one has contested or expressed material concern for in this entire
process.
Waterfront Toronto’s senior leadership is consistently dodging important questions from
concerned residents and the media. The leadership has yet to comment on recent reports that
Sidewalk Labs is asking potential local consultants to hand over any intellectual property that is
developed to the Alphabet-owned company – and in cases where that’s not possible, to give
Sidewalk Labs an exclusive, royalty-free, worldwide licence to use it – a brazen departure from
Waterfront Toronto’s position on intellectual property as “TBD” in the shared planned
development agreement, and a slap in the face of their professed goal of “encouraging local
innovation”
Each of the public meetings so far has been a massive lost opportunity to honestly and
meaningfully engage with the public on things that it is rightfully concerned about. Instead of
admitting that this project is much more complex than perhaps Waterfront Toronto realized at
the outset, when it did not widely consult with the public prior to issuing the RFP for Quayside;
and therefore warrants pause, reflection, and decisive courage focused on public safety and
value-creation for innovative Canadian companies first – we find ourselves forced into a
disorienting loop where resident and local, national, and global tech community concerns are
ignored, and willful misdirection has thus far been endorsed through Waterfront Toronto’s
silence.
As a panel member who entered this engagement with great enthusiasm and even greater
hope, this resignation is a difficult decision for me to make. As the only person of colour on a
panel that doesn’t even have Indigenous representation to my knowledge, representing public
interest for a city as diverse as Toronto, I do so with a very heavy heart. My intent from day one
of this engagement was to contribute through my experience and expertise as a technologist, a
Toronto resident, and a passionate advocate for public good. In the absence of even a single
public record of any of our panel meetings and the myriad concerns raised within, I cannot in
good conscience continue to participate in this advisory role when this continuation may imply to
the public that I endorse and approve of Waterfront Toronto’s consistent inaction and approach
on both the process and this project. I don’t.
In the last public roundtable meeting in August, a resident shared their serious concern with me
about the fact that official Sidewalk Toronto materials and soundbites thus far do not address
the blast radius of making mistakes on a city-scale. That is, a city’s infrastructure has an
obsolescence of many decades, it is not like a new phone that we can change in a couple of
years if we find it to be problematic. I emphatically agree with their concern. Broad licensing that
does not prioritize digital rights of the public can mean that surveillance infrastructure and
valuable public data can lay latent for long periods of time, and avoid scrutiny easily, tucked in a
foreign-owned company’s proprietary vault. The question we need to be focused on is not how
can we build a better monopoly-tech-company led, surveillance-based city (puzzlingly,
something even some of my fellow panelists are lending their organizational credibility to) but
the fact that we have enough evidence to know that we don’t want to build that at all. There is
nothing innovative about city-building that disenfranchises its residents in insidious ways and
robs valuable earnings out of public budgets, or commits scarce public funds to the ongoing
maintenance of technology that city leadership has not even declared a need for. As a
technologist I know there are other ways to do this and I will be committing my future efforts to
further developing those alternatives with community partners to ensure the City of Toronto
thinks about all of its options, not just this option.
If Waterfront Toronto truly believes that the goal for developing Quayside is to encourage local
innovation and build a livable, affordable city that prioritizes public safety and interest, then no
progress on this venture is possible without its leadership standing accountable to the residents
on whose behalf it has been given the responsibility to act, and do so with humility and courage.
And there is no version of being a good steward for the people of Toronto, where Waterfront
Toronto does not ensure that both the data and the digital infrastructure in all its developments
is controlled by our public institutions.
Sincerely,
Saadia Muzaffar
Toronto, Ontario
http://www.opc.ca.gov/webmaster/_media_library/2018/10/California-OA-Action-Plan-Final.pdf
About this Document
This State of California Ocean Acidification Action Plan (Action Plan) was produced
by the California Ocean Protection Council in cooperation with the California Ocean
Science Trust. It articulates a 10-year vision for addressing ocean acidification and a
series of pragmatic actions to work towards that vision. It is designed for integration
into public agency operations and to inform decisions made by members of the
private sector and scientific community. It was developed within the framework
of the International Alliance to Combat Ocean Acidification (OA Alliance), a global
partnership founded in 2016 to assist governments in taking meaningful action to
anticipate, mitigate, and adapt to the significant changes to the chemistry of the
world’s oceans that are now occurring as a result of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions
and other contributors. This Action Plan fulfills one of California’s obligations to the
OA Alliance, is consistent with the OA Alliance’s goals and may serve as a model
for other jurisdictions seeking to undertake concrete actions to better understand,
mitigate, and adapt to ocean acidification.
By joining the OA Alliance, members endorse a Call to Action which formally recognizes the urgent need to act on ocean acidification by investing in research and monitoring, exploring adaptation and mitigation strategies to changing ocean conditions, engaging in public outreach and education, and making deeper commitments to reduce carbon emissions to protect the economic and cultural resources at risk in coastal communities around the world.
Government members of the OA Alliance are encouraged to create an OA Action Plan that describes their own unique contribution to advancing some or all the 5 goals of the OA Alliance as written in the Call to Action. OA Action Plans will help governments create actionable responses to threats in their regions and will help affiliate members best leverage their expertise and resources on this issue.
Governments benefit from working together, and with other affiliate members, to mitigate carbon emissions and other contributors to ocean acidification, sharing knowledge about the impacts of ocean acidification, and learning how to adapt locally to the ongoing changes in ocean conditions.
1
International Alliance to Combat Ocean Acidification
A Global Call to Action
I. The Threat of Ocean Acidification
We, the endorsing parties to this Call to Action hereby agree as follows:
A. Emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) into the atmosphere are increasing the amount of CO2 being absorbed by the world’s oceans. Increasing CO2 levels have altered the basic chemical composition of our oceans causing them to become more acidified.
B. Increasing acidification combined with other climate-change driven changes in ocean conditions, including warmer temperatures and reduced oxygen levels, are already causing unprecedented damage to ocean and marine ecosystems.
Read more “GLOBAL International Alliance – Ocean Acidification – A Call to ACTION . . .”