NoahWatson
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https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/...g-smart-city-toronto-despite-privacy-concerns
Privacy Expert Resigns From Alphabet-Backed Smart City Project Over Surveillance Concerns
https://www.businessinsider.com/ap-...es-3-directors-after-google-deal-2018-12?IR=T
After nine months of closed-door negotiations, Google’s sister company Sidewalk Labs and public corporation Waterfront Toronto have signed an agreement to proceed with a controversial plan to create Toronto’s neighbourhood of the future. The new deal, released Tuesday, solidifies Sidewalk Labs’ $50-million investment to forge a final agreement to build “Sidewalk Toronto” on Quayside, a 12-acre plot of land on Toronto’s waterfront.
Sidewalk Toronto has been marketed as a high-tech community, prioritizing sustainability, safety, and affordability through innovative technology. Think autonomous vehicles, underground garbage robots, green energy infrastructure, snow-melting sidewalks, modular construction, wooden buildings, and more. The neighbourhood, built “from the Internet up,” will be underpinned by pervasive data collection through connected sensors and personal information that people would share to access customized programs and services.
Both Sidewalk Labs and Waterfront Toronto like to talk about how this data-driven neighbourhood will “improve quality of life” and “drive urban innovation” to help solve the urgent problems faced by cities around the world.
Privacy Expert Resigns From Alphabet-Backed Smart City Project Over Surveillance Concerns
A privacy expert tasked with helping a new smart city development protect the data privacy of residents has resigned over concerns that her guidelines would be largely ignored.
“I imagined us creating a Smart City of Privacy, as opposed to a Smart City of Surveillance,” Ann Cavoukian, the former privacy commissioner of Ontario, wrote in her resignation letter from Google sister company Sidewalk Labs, reports Global News.
https://www.businessinsider.com/ap-...es-3-directors-after-google-deal-2018-12?IR=T
TORONTO (AP) — The chairwoman of a government organization that signed an agreement with a Google affiliated company to create a smart-city development in Toronto says she and two other appointed board members have been fired.