Google’s plans for first wired urban community raise data-privacy concerns

Sidewalk Labs, a unit of Google’s parent company Alphabet, is proposing to turn a rundown part of Toronto’s waterfront into what may be the most wired community in history — to “fundamentally refine what urban life can be.” High-level interest is clear: Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Alphabet’s then-Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt appeared together to announce the plan Oct 2017. But some Canadians are rethinking the privacy implications of giving one of the most data-hungry companies on the planet the means to wire up everything from streetlights to pavement. And some want the public to get a cut of the revenue from products developed using Canada’s largest city as an urban laboratory. 

Julie Di Lorenzo, a prominent Toronto developer who resigned from the Waterfront Toronto board over the project, said, “How can (Waterfront Toronto), a corporation established by three levels of democratically elected government, have shared values with a limited, for-profit company whose premise is embedded data collection?”