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Canada is being sued over Sidewalk Labs' smart city project
The Canadian Civil Liberties Association (CCLA) is suing three levels of government and Waterfront Toronto, a publicly-funded organization, over a planned smart neighborhood in Quayside. The suit claims that two legal agreements drawn up between Waterfront Toronto and Sidewalk Labs, an offshoot of Google's parent company Alphabet, violate the personal and collective privacy rights of Canadian citizens. "The Google-Waterfront Toronto deal is invalid and needs to be reset," Michael Bryant, Executive Director and General Counsel for the CCLA said during a press conference yesterday. "These agreements are contrary to administrative and constitutional law, and set a terrible precedent for the rest of this country."
Sidewalk Labs is under pressure to explain its smart city dream
Sidewalk Labs, the part of Alphabet focused on smart cities, is behind schedule. The company had planned to publish its grand vision for Quayside, a 12-acre site on Toronto's industrial waterfront, in the fall of 2018. Last June, however, the first version of its crucial Master Innovation and Development Plan (MIDP) was pushed back to early 2019. "It will be a comprehensive document, but still a work-in-progress," a press release clarified at the time. A complete MIDP would then be published in "spring 2019," the company said, following a public roundtable.
Google’s smart city dream is turning into a privacy nightmare
Sidewalk Labs, an Alphabet division focused on smart cities, is caught in a battle over information privacy. The team has lost its lead expert and consultant, Ann Cavoukian, over a proposed data trust that would approve and manage the collection of information inside Quayside, a conceptual smart neighborhood in Toronto. Cavoukian, the former information and privacy commissioner for Ontario, disagrees with the current plan because it would give the trust power to approve data collection that isn't anonymized or "de-identified" at the source. "I had a really hard time with that," she told Engadget. "I just couldn't... I couldn't live with that."
Sidewalk Labs unpacks its Quayside smart city dream
Sidewalk Labs still has a ways to go before it realizes its futuristic vision for Toronto's Eastern Waterfront, but we now know what the smart neighborhood could look like. The Alphabet-owned company has released (PDF) mock-ups and illustrations for the "Quayside," along with details that elaborate on its plans to build the community with lots and lots of wood. Sidewalk Labs plans to use tall timber construction, a method that uses engineered wood, for the buildings in the area.
Inside Google’s plan to build a smart neighborhood in Toronto
On the Sidewalk Labs website is a 200-page document explaining its vision for a smart neighborhood in Toronto. It's packed with illustrations that show a warm, idyllic community full of grassy parks, modular buildings and underground tunnels with delivery robots and internet cabling inside. The text describes "a truly complete community" that's free of cars and committed to reducing its carbon footprint. Underpinning everything is a network of sensors that can monitor noise, traffic and pollution, collecting the troves of data required to understand and improve the city's design. Flipping through the pages, it's easy to see how the company -- an offshoot of Google parent Alphabet -- was chosen to revitalize the Lake Ontario waterfront. The lengthy pitch document, however, is just a taste of what the area might become. It's a dreamy but meticulously thought-out mood board summarizing what Sidewalk Labs has been pondering for the past two years. Reading it cover to cover, you can get lost in the scale and ambition of such a project. Most companies would struggle to execute just one aspect of the plan: autonomous transit, for instance, or buildings that can be quickly and cheaply repurposed depending on the time of day or needs of the city. Sidewalk Labs, however, wants to do it all.
Alphabet’s Sidewalk Labs is building an 'internet city' in Toronto
The next step for Alphabet's Sidewalk Labs is making a 2,000 acre smart neighborhood in Toronto. Google Canada will relocate its headquarters to the newly created Quayside neighborhood along the Eastern Waterfront to serve as an anchor for the area, and will invest some $50 million in the first phase of planning and project testing, according to a press release. The entire project could cost as much as $1 billion, Wall Street Journal reports. TechCrunch writes that an additional $1.25 billion will come from Toronto itself. Prime minister Justin Trudeau said that the move is to make for "smarter, greener, more inclusive" cities that he hopes will expand across Toronto and eventually the globe.
