Sidewalk Labs listening on smart-city proposal, CEO says
On the one-year anniversary of his company’s formal launch of its smart-city project, Sidewalk Labs CEO Dan Doctoroff was back in Toronto, doing what sounded a little bit like damage control.
Sidewalk Labs is a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc. (better known as the parent company to Google) and has partnered with Waterfront Toronto on what has become a controversial initiative to redevelop the city’s Quayside neighbourhood.
On Wednesday, Doctoroff spoke at the Fortune Global Forum before heading to a lunch for a new advisory council linked to the project, and at both events he sent the same message: Sidewalk Labs wants only to be a “catalyst” for the smart-city project; it doesn’t want the data or the development opportunities that flow from it.
“I don’t think anybody would ever expect a company like us to actually propose something like this,” Doctoroff said onstage at the Fortune event. “It’s a pretty radical approach, but one we think is necessary to protect the public interest.”
The comments came after the company on Monday released a new policy proposal, in which it suggested that all data collected in public spaces from the project be held by an independent trust to provide transparency and equal access.
On Wednesday, Doctoroff also clarified that as “catalyst,” Sidewalk Labs doesn’t aspire to be the developer for every inch of the Quayside development on Toronto’s eastern waterfront, it just wants to be the spark that ignites partners to build a new sort of urban development built on fresh ideas and innovation.
He suggested that they might turn a profit through some sort of financing mechanism, or by providing ancillary services that stitch it all together, or by some other means through limited real estate development.
Members of the media were not allowed to attend Doctoroff’s speech to the new community advisory council that Sidewalk Labs has created, and the names of the council members have not been made public, but the company released the text of his speech.
Sidewalk Labs has emphasized that they’re conducting an unprecedentedly broad public consultation process, with multiple advisory bodies and a series of lectures, roundtables and engagement forums over a period of many months, befitting the unprecedented nature of the project.
But this week’s events, and the creation of the new advisory council also come amid mounting criticism.
There was the resignation of Saadia Muzaffar, founder of TechGirls Canada, who was sitting on a Digital Strategy Advisory Panel associated with the project. She said Sidewalk Labs wasn’t listening to public concerns.
And Research In Motion co-founder Jim Balsillie wrote an opinion piece in the Globe and Mail citing serious concerns about privacy, and the intellectual property that Sidewalk Labs may take from the project.
The Globe has since reported that other members of the Digital Strategy Advisory Panel are also threatening to quit, and NDP MP Charlie Angus has called for a “pause” on the project.
“The idea of developing an urban smart city that’s wired in with technology, I think it’s fascinating. My concern about Google is we’ve seen a number of questions being raised about anti-competitive practices of Google, of control of Canadian data,” Angus told the Financial Post.
And there’s more than a bit of confusion around what’s actually happening with the consultation process at this point. Originally the public consultations were all supposed to happen this year, but now the final draft master plan from Sidewalk Labs won’t be released until sometime in early 2019. In addition, a series of “civic labs” meant to dive deep into privacy and data-ownership issues were supposed to start on Oct. 3 but have been delayed, and there is no firm word on when they will actually take place.
Doctoroff said that all that’s really happening at this stage is that Sidewalk Labs is developing a plan, and ultimately that plan will be publicly released and open to public feedback, along with approvals from various governments long before anything concrete actually happens.