Nextdoor social network set to launch in Canada
Neighbours love app, but racial profiling allegations persist
When Fiona Lake Waslander packed up her life in San Carlos, Calif., and moved her family to Toronto in 2017, the tech entrepreneur was giving up more than warmer temperatures and easy access to Silicon Valley.
In her year and a half in the U.S., Lake Waslander had grown attached to San Francisco-based social network Nextdoor, which is designed so neighbours can bond by offering free furniture, posting about lost pets and local events and soliciting plumbing or babysitting recommendations.
Lake Waslander used Nextdoor so often she considered it a “saviour” and was disappointed when she learned it wasn’t available in Toronto.
“I actually reached out to Nextdoor (when we moved) and said, ‘When are you launching in Canada?’ ” she recalled.
“I couldn’t believe it when a month or so ago they reached back out to tell me ‘we are launching in Canada, if you want to join’ … I signed up. I tweeted. I posted on Facebook. I used the platform to send postcards to my neighbours to get them to sign up … I thought, ‘Let’s encourage our neighbourhood to use it.’ ”
Nextdoor — founded in 2011 and already available in more than 237,000 neighbourhoods across the U.S., Europe and Australia — seems to be finally expanding into Canada.
Nextdoor spokesperson Caroline Barrett declined to discuss the company’s plans, saying in an email that it hasn’t released the timing of its official launch in Canada yet and isn’t conducting interviews until then.
However, dozens of Canadians have recently signed up for the platform, there’s already a Canadian site set up
and Nextdoor circulated a job posting in July for a country manager to handle Canadian operations from Toronto.
The popular online platform has locked in more than $400 million (U.S.) in funding from big-name investors — including Benchmark, Greylock Partners, Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers and Tiger Global Management — and it has been embraced by consumers as a useful and fun way to stay in touch with neighbours in an increasingly digital world.
However, the platform has also been dogged by controversy that could dampen its Canadian debut.
According to a report from 2015 in Oakland paper the East Bay Express, Nextdoor’s crime pages have attracted unsubstantiated “suspicious activity” warnings, triggering calls to the police about Black citizens who had done nothing wrong.
Nextdoor, the report said, has been used to accuse Black salespeople and mail carriers of being thieves. Some blame the platform for an incident where neighbours screamed at people of colour to leave a shared garden space, and another where police were called to investigate young children in their own home.
Such reports were enough to make former Ontario privacy commissioner Ann Cavoukian, who developed an internationally lauded framework for embedding privacy principles into technology, call the platform “distressing.”
“It makes me very nervous,” she told the Star. “Individuals have no control over what is posted about them.”
Nextdoor has tried to halt the spread of racial profiling. It altered the platform to prompt users who mention race when posting on crime and safety pages to provide additional information about a person’s attire and hair. It also added an explainer on its website about unconscious bias and what truly qualifies as suspicious activity worth reporting on the platform.
Nextdoor has since claimed to have reduced racial profiling by 75 per cent, but experts still have worries.
Part of Cavoukian’s uneasiness around Nextdoor is due to the fact that the network is location-based. The company says it uses a “distance-based algorithm” to connect users to a neighbourhood “closest to you geographically, without creating too large of a coverage area.”
Users can share their address by submitting their house or unit number, but they also have the option to limit their shared location to just their street. Addresses are verified through text messages, a postcard containing a special code sent to the home, a neighbour’s approval or geolocation tracking. All users must sign in with their real name.
“It can become a huge marketing tool if there is the ability to create potentially accurate profiles of people and target them with ads,” Cavoukian said. “Within my home, which is the last bastion of privacy, I want to make sure my location is protected and I don’t want my geolocation shared. I personally would urge people to stay away from this.”
Nextdoor says it never shares personal info with third-party advertisers, but it does allow realtors to promote listings on the platform and it makes money through sponsored content and advertising. In fact, founder Nirav Tolia told Adweek in 2017he believes the company — recently valued at $2 billion (U.S.), though it has not said if it’s profitable yet — can make $1 billion off advertising by 2020 because it receives 1,000 advertising requests per week.
Given its access to funding, its revenue model and past successes in other markets, the platform may well find success in Canada, despite the privacy issues and the allegations of allowing racial profiling.
Justin Patterson, an internet research analyst at Raymond James and Associates, said the company’s strength lies in its high daily engagement rates that come from a large audience. He believes the company will do “fairly well” here because it has already proven itself in the U.S. and overseas.
“There should really not be that much of a difference between people in Canada wanting to learn more about what is going on in their community than people in the U.S. or Europe … More relevant community information is something that is universal.”
Still, Jenn Takahashi, a San Francisco communications worker at dating platform Coffee Meets Bagel, has concerns about the lingering problems with Nextdoor.
She started @bestofnextdoor, a Twitter account sharing the most amusing items on the platform in 2017, after she noticed a neighbour posting every day around 4 p.m. about someone moving her lawn gnomes. Now she has more than 200,000 followers who giggle at posts about a lost Roomba vacuum named Steve that escaped out someone’s front door and someone seeking swimming lessons for their Pomeranian. Among those lighthearted submissions, she sees plenty of “really horrible” and “emotionally draining” ones about racism.
“I don’t highlight them because I am trying not to put that type of energy out there,” she said. She is, however, excited to see how the Canadian market responds to the platform, especially if it means more amusing posts.
“Aren’t Canadians supposed to be super nice? So what kind of drama could you guys possibly have,” she teased. “Will someone accidentally plant some roses in your garden or something?”