Civil liberties group sues to quash Sidewalk Labs project
• Things are heating up for the sidewalk labs smart city project in toronto, with a final master plan expected to be delivered by the company “in the coming weeks” and opponents of the project intensifying their efforts to derail it.
on tuesday, one of those critics, the Canadian Civil liberties association, filed a court application seeking to effectively quash the project, arguing that it was unconstitutional without adequate policy governing data and privacy from various levels of government.
“the Quayside agreements empower sidewalk labs and others to effect historically unprecedented, non-consensual, inappropriate mass-capture surveillance and commoditization of personal data of individuals who live in, work in or visit Quayside,” the Ccla court application said.
also tuesday, the chief executive of sidewalk labs, dan doctoroff, gave a speech and held a “fireside chat” with BNN journalist amanda lang during a Canadian Club luncheon.
doctoroff would not take questions from reporters, and on stage at the event he brushed aside the Ccla court application, only saying, “i haven’t seen the lawsuit” before moving on.
later in the day, sidewalk labs spokeswoman Keerthana rang emailed a statement that read: “sidewalk labs fully supports a robust and healthy discussion regarding privacy, data ownership and governance. But this debate must be rooted in fact, not fiction and fear mongering. it’s unfortunate that once again the Ccla has chosen to mischaracterize our work and our engagement with the people of toronto.”
the release of the Master innovation and development Plan (Midp) will be a pivotal moment for the sidewalk toronto project. in the fall of 2017, the company won a request for proposals from the federal-provincial-municipal development agency Waterfront toronto, and ever since it’s been doing public consultation events and working toward writing the final Midp.
at the event, doctoroff said he expects the final document to be about 1,000 pages long, and cover many aspects of the project in extraordinary detail, but even at that point he said the whole thing will still be open to negotiation with the various levels of government who will ultimately have to approve it.
doctoroff talked at length about the company’s plans to develop a manufacturing process around tall wood buildings, and said that the consultation process has been so painstaking that the company has changed the size of the modular hexagonal paving stones it plans on using to make the design more friendly to people in wheelchairs.
But on the issue of data and privacy, sidewalk labs hasn’t offered much detail except to put forward a proposal for a civic data trust — an independent regulatory agency that would need to approve any sensor systems for data collection in the public realm at Quayside.
the company has not said specifically what sensor systems it wants to put in Quayside, and doctoroff gave no indication tuesday, but he said that it could be a subject of negotiation with governments “how much technology you actually want to deploy.”
sidewalk labs is owned by Alphabet Inc., Google’s parent company. doctoroff said that alphabet wants to be involved in urban development because they believe they can literally change cities in a way that nobody has seen in a century.
“We believe that we are at a unique moment in time,” he said.
“literally, this is one of these once-in-a-hundredyear moments when there’s a set of technologies or innovations that can be deployed to fundamentally affect the curve on life in our urban environments. We’ve probably had three of these in the last 200 years.”