Experts are leaving Alphabet’s smart-city project over privacy concerns
An expert that Alphabet’s Sidewalk Labs hired to oversee privacy issues related to an ambitious smart-city project has quit over proposed data-collection practices.
Details: Sidewalk Labs is trying to build a futuristic neighborhood called Quayside on Toronto’s waterfront. The development is the first big assignment for the Google sister company, which was founded in 2015 to develop technology to alleviate urban problems.
But: The project keeps running into obstacles. In August, it delayed the release of its final development plan because of local resistance. Now privacy concerns have compelled Ann Cavoukian, the former privacy commissioner for the province of Ontario, to leave the project. She says she resigned because third-party companies and developers might be able to access identifiable information about Quayside residents once the project gets built. (Sidewalk Labs says it should not formulate rules for third parties on its own and proposes creating a “Civic Data Trust” to devise that policy instead.) Another advisor also left in recent weeks over privacy issues.
Why it matters: Sidewalk Labs intends to sell technologies originally developed for Quayside to other cities. That means these privacy practices could affect a number of people, potentially around the world. The controversy also feeds the ongoing debate of whether big tech companies are doing enough to protect user data.
Keep Reading
Most Popular
The inside story of how ChatGPT was built from the people who made it
Exclusive conversations that take us behind the scenes of a cultural phenomenon.
How Rust went from a side project to the world’s most-loved programming language
For decades, coders wrote critical systems in C and C++. Now they turn to Rust.
Design thinking was supposed to fix the world. Where did it go wrong?
An approach that promised to democratize design may have done the opposite.
Sam Altman invested $180 million into a company trying to delay death
Can anti-aging breakthroughs add 10 healthy years to the human life span? The CEO of OpenAI is paying to find out.
Stay connected
Get the latest updates from
MIT Technology Review
Discover special offers, top stories, upcoming events, and more.