Civil liberties group hoping to stop Quayside smart city

Fearing Canadians will become “Google’s lab rat,” this country’s top civil liberties association is seeking a judicial review that would “nullify” legal agreements behind Sidewalk Labs’ smart city project in Toronto.

The Canadian Civil Liberties Association (CCLA) and Toronto resident Lester Brown filed an application with the Superior Court of Justice seeking to block the agreements between Sidewalk Labs and Waterfront Toronto.

The suit also says, “if necessary,” the courts should impose an injunction preventing Waterfront Toronto from approving a final master plan for the tech-driven neighbourhood, a master plan Sidewalk Labs, Google’s sister firm, says it will release sometime in the next several weeks.

Sidewalk Labs is working on creating a sensor-laden neighbourhood on a 4.9-hectare plot of land on Queens Quay called Quayside.

If the beta site project “proves out,” Sidewalk says it wants other interests — developers, governments, etc. — to take the lessons from Quayside and expand them into the nearby Port Lands.

Sidewalk Labs has called for an independent civic data trust to control any of the data that sensors collect in Quayside, including data gathered from people who live in, work in, or visit the neighbourhood.

Sidewalk also says it will depersonalize data collected at Quayside, and will not monetize the data.

But the plans to collect data have alarmed many critics of the project who fear privacy rights will be violated.

The CCLA had threatened to take legal action last month, saying the Quayside project should be halted until all three levels of government have established “digital data governance polices” for the “appropriate” collection, ownership, use and storage of personal information that would be obtained in the smart city.

“Waterfront Toronto and our federal, provincial and municipal governments sold-out our constitutional rights to freedom from surveillance and sold it to the global behemoth of behavioural data collection Google,” CCLA executive director and general counsel Michael Bryant, a former Ontario attorney general and former Liberal MPP, told a news conference at Queen’s Park on Tuesday.

“Canadians should not be Google’s lab rat. This lab needs to be shut down and reset,” Bryant added.

The claims have not been tested in court. The CCLA now has 30 days to file a record of its case with the court.

Waterfront Toronto is waiting to receive evidence from the CCLA before filing its response, a Waterfront Toronto spokesperson said.