Skift Take
It doesn't seem like a good idea to build a business, let alone make your home, in a surveillance experiment controlled by Alphabet. As data security and privacy become more important, the vision for the modern smart city will have to shift.
The movement toward smart cities has progressed slowly in recent years due to the complexity of not just building a completely new form of digital infrastructure but the political tensions surrounding turning a destination into a data extraction system.
It's one thing for data on public utilities and traffic to be collected and accessed by government officials. It's another for a private corporation to take the lead in developing a neighborhood to suit its vision of the future.
The master plan for Sidewalk Labs' vision for Toronto's waterfront was released last week, painting a picture of a multi-decade effort to build an innovation district that will not just revitalize the area but act as a model for future smart city projects built out of public-private partnerships. Sidewalk Labs falls under Alphabet, which is also the parent of Google. The project, though, has faced backlash from Toronto residents as it aims to transform a 12-acre lot into a testbed for the internet of things and new methods of data collection.
Sidewalk Labs identifies five key components of building the new district: economic development, sustainability, housing affordability, mobility, and urban innovation, which is vague but seems to mean using data to improve city services.
The pitch is that bringing 93,000 new jobs to a reb
