In the late 1990s, when the internet was still in its adolescence and smartphones were still years away, my greatest privacy concerns revolved around not wanting professional wrestling fans to know my real name or home address. At that point, I did not know what I did not know and wondered “what else about me was there to be learned anywhere online that would affect my private life?”
Oh, how I long for those simple days of clearing your browser history before anyone came home to feel safe.
Privacy is a much more complex minefield to traverse, lo, these many years later. With so many governments, businesses and private persons, all trying to gather and sort every byte of personal data they can scrape from the internet and the world at large, in order to gain a competitive advantage in whatever their field of endeavour may be, the individual desire to not constantly be surveilled… to keep secret that which we wish to have kept secret… to not just be another column on someone else’s spreadsheet… grows.
Dr. Ann Cavoukian, before, during and after her time as a consultant for Sidewalk Labs (a company owned by Google’s corporate parent, Alphabet), expressed concerns that the plans for a Toronto smart city would violate various tenets of her Privacy By Design Framework.
Sidewalk initially acknowledged the notion of being proactive not reactive to privacy concerns, the first point of the PBD Framework. This much is inherent in the company’s hiring of Cavoukian, the former Privacy Commissioner of Ontario. But, they then fall short in almost every other measure.
This is particularly true in regards to the second and third elements of the Privacy By Design Framework: making privacy the default setting and embedding privacy in the design.
Cavoukian called for Sidewalk Labs to automatically strip all data collected in the proposed 12-acre complex of any personal identifiers. Dr. Cavoukian posits that anyone entering the smart city space should be able to do so without having to take any specific additional action to protect their privacy. Sidewalk punted on these notions by saying that it could not police what other companies or partner businesses did with their copies of the collected data. Instead of insisting that to any corporate partners agree to de-identify all information upon collection and before use, Sidewalk absolved it self of the responsibility by suggesting there needed to be an independent body to set privacy rules for the development. (Wong, 2018)
Later, Cavoukian would learn that Sidewalk’s initial plans, even before it partnered with Waterfront Toronto, included utilizing the smart city infrastructure to track people’s movements. (Coop, 2019) This would definitely violate the sixth and seventh tenets of the PBD Framework: Visibility and Transparency and Respect for User Privacy.
By publicly partnering with Sidewalk Labs on the Quayside project, as it did in 2019 (Smith, 2019), George Brown College opened itself up to potential future damage to its reputation should data from the smart city be found to be misused or abused. A loss of trust in the college could have damaged its ability to attract both the new students and business partners crucial to its operation.
I believe that the May 2020 decision to walk away from Quayside was made far less in the shadow of the then-growing coronavirus pandemic and more in the face of the criticism the project was receiving from influential names in the investment and tech worlds and pushback from Waterfront Toronto, the inter-governmental agency working on the project, to aspects of Sidewalk’s proposal. (Cecco, 2020)
Short of trapping oneself inside a Faraday cage, there is little that we can do in 2022 to avoid being a part of the informational ecosphere. I am personally grateful that there are people like Ann Cavoukian dedicated to and advocating for our privacy.
References
Cavoukian , A. (10 May 2015). Privacy by Design The 7 Foundational Principles. Toronto; Ryerson University.
CBC. (2020). I resigned in protest from Sidewalk Labs’ ‘smart city’ project over privacy concerns. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1t12UqYl5SA.
Cecco, L. (7 May 2020). Google affiliate Sidewalk Labs abruptly abandons Toronto smart city project. The Guardian UK. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/may/07/google-sidewalk-labs-toronto-smart-city-abandoned
Coop, A. (31 October 2019). New deal with Sidewalk Labs a huge win, says Waterfront Toronto’s privacy consultant. IT World Canada. https://www.itworldcanada.com/article/new-deal-with-sidewalk-labs-a-huge-win-says-waterfront-torontos-privacy-consultant
Smith, B. (28 November 2019). Sidewalk Labs signs letter of intent to collaborate with George Brown College. IT World Canada. https://www.itworldcanada.com/article/sidewalk-labs-signs-letter-of-intent-to-collaborate-with-george-brown-college/424542
Wong, N. (5 November 2018). Sidewalk Labs urged to scrub ‘treasure trove’ of personal details from its Toronto smart city. Financial Post. https://financialpost.com/technology/google-urged-to-scrub-personal-details-from-toronto-digital-city