Front Burner - Google, Alphabet and the fight over a controversial 'smart city' in Toronto

Episode Date: November 12, 2018

CBC technology reporter Matthew Braga explains Sidewalk Toronto's plan to create a futuristic neighbourhood on waterfront property in downtown Toronto and breaks down why some say the high-tech smart city is the solution to our urban woes... while others are concerned about the intentions of the Google-affiliated company.

Hey there, I'm Kathleen Goltar and I have a confession to make. I am a true crime fanatic. I devour books and films and most of all true crime podcasts. But sometimes I just want to know more. I want to go deeper. And that's where my podcast Crime Story comes in. Every week I go behind the scenes with the creators of the best in true crime. I chat with the host of Scamanda, Teacher's Pet, Bone Valley, the list goes on. For the insider scoop, find Crime Story in your podcast app. This is a CBC Podcast. So we're in Sidewalk Labs Welcome Centre. I think that's probably the best way to describe it.

It looks like a welcome center. Hi. Are you Jesse? Yeah. Hi, I'm Shannon. I work for CBC. Hey. Do you have a second if I ask you two questions?

Yeah. I'm Jesse Chapins, and I'm the director of public realm at Sidewalk Labs. We are at an inflection point with how technology is influencing our lives and influencing our cities. And rather than let that sort of run roughshod, can we be proactive in thinking about how to use that to make our cities better for as many people as possible? There's not a malicious intent here. People might want to look for that, but that's fundamentally not the case. Hello, I'm Jamie Poisson. So that was me and our producer, Shannon Higgins, talking with Jesse Chapins about Sidewalk Toronto. It's a plan to create a futuristic neighborhood on waterfront property right in downtown Toronto.

And as you just heard, Jesse says there's no malicious intent coming from Google's parent company, which is behind the project. But a lot of people are having a hard time buying that. And depending on who you ask, Sidewalk Toronto is either the solution to our urban woes or a techno-utopian Trojan horse. That's today on FrontBurner. I'm Matthew Braga. I'm a senior technology reporter with CBC News. Hi, Matt. Hi, Jamie. So I'm hoping you can help me start this story by taking us back to something that Google's co-founder Larry Page said way back in 2013.

There's many, many exciting and important things you could do that you just can't do because they're illegal or they're not allowed by regulation. And that makes sense. We don't want our world to change too fast. But maybe we should set aside a small part of the world. I like going to Burning Man, for example. That's an environment where people can try out different things, but not everybody has to go. I think as technologists, we should have some safe places where we can try out some new things and figure out what is the effect on society, what's the effect on people, without having to deploy it kind of into the normal world.

And people who like those kinds of things can go there and experience that. And we don't have mechanisms for that. Matt, I'm going to let you take this. What did we just hear? So at a conference in 2013, Google has this annual conference they call Google I.O. And back in 2013, Larry Page surprised everyone, came up on stage and just started taking questions from the audience. And in the course of one of his answers to one of these questions just started laying out this almost just like he had pulled this idea out of his head. Like, what if, what if we just had a place to experiment?

What if we could take all of the cool things that we're doing with technology and just kind of prototype and experiment in this place where we wouldn't have to deal with rules and regulations and all the things that are part of a city? And so is it fair to say that this is like the first hint that Google might be interested in building a city? I think at the time, everyone, we joked about it. We said, oh, it's this vision for Google Island or Google City. And I think it was a little bit of a simpler time where it was funnier to joke about, I think, in large part because we

thought, oh, you know, like, is that actually going to happen? Like, are we actually going to to see this sort of vision realized? I mean, this was a company that couldn't even figure out how to build a successful social network. Google is shutting down its social network. Google Plus, after the private data of up to 500,000 users was potentially exposed. Google has known about the bug since March, but didn't tell users about it until. Google has known about the bug since March, but didn't tell users about it until the Wall Street Journal revealed the issue. Right, I mean, let alone can we expect them

to build a city, but I think over time, we started to see that perhaps that vision wasn't as fanciful as some people might have thought. as some people might have thought. Okay, so how does this become a little bit more of a reality? Like, how do we start to see this evolve? So Larry Page talks about this, maybe Google Island, Google neighborhood, whatever you want to call it. And then a couple of years later, actually announces that, you know what, Google is going to spin off a new company and we're

going to call it Sidewalk Labs. And the whole idea behind Sidewalk Labs is to take technology and try to use it to make cities better and smarter and operate more efficiently. It was sort of a continuation in some ways of that idea that Larry put out a couple years prior of, yeah, what if we had sort of looser regulations or an environment that was a little bit more free to tinker with? Like a technological Burning Man. It really kind of did in some ways follow in that Burning Man ethos, right, which is very much, you know, how can we create a new communal way of living from nothing, right? It's like the city that emerges from the dust of the desert from scratch. And so it doesn't surprise me that you have someone like Larry who goes to this every

year and says, well, what if we did that? What if we set something up from scratch, but in more of a googly way? In more of a googly way. Okay. So Sidewalk Labs is a company owned by Google? Sidewalk Labs is a company that was created by Google. But then a couple of years ago, if you'll recall, Google created a parent company called Alphabet, which Google now sits under. Sidewalk Labs also sits under as well.

So Google, Sidewalk Labs owned by Alphabet. Got it. And then now where does Toronto fit into this? So last year, Waterfront Toronto, which is this government agency, part city, part provincial, part federal, in the city of Toronto, they're responsible for the development of Toronto's waterfront. And they had this derelict portion of the waterfront along the city's eastern side. And it was called Quayside. And they, this being Waterfront Toronto, said, hey, we want someone to redevelop this land. And not only do we want someone to redevelop this land, we also want someone who can be a partner with us, someone who can innovate

and provide funding. And we're really going to like co-create this like new thing that hasn't existed before. And they solicited some plans. And fast forward to the fall of 2017, and Sidewalk Labs is one of the companies that submits a plan. Toronto's in an elite class of cities in North America. San Francisco, New York City, just a handful of others that are so popular, have such great demand that it also poses incredible challenges of growth. So really Sidewalk Labs is a solution to this derelict stretch of land in Toronto

that the government has been struggling to develop for years. I know this piece of land, it sucks. It's very barren. People have wanted it to be developed for a long time. And so in a way, is it fair to say that Sidewalk Labs provided a solution to that? They came in with a fanciful vision document for what this neighborhood and even like a larger part of the city could be at its most connected, its most sort of technologically infused. And so they really took a lot of the little kind of experiments and prototypes that certainly

Larry had kind of hinted at and that Sidewalk had been tinkering with since its founding and said, what if we applied that to an entire neighborhood, an entire section of a city? And so they came in and covered everything from transit, so self-driving cars. Another solution we might explore is using autonomous vehicles as a kind of shared fleet or shuttle service. Traffic cameras with AI built into them. And then in real time decide, I'm going to hold the cars until this person has safely made it across. To, you know, sensors that could look at sort of the temperature and the air quality and whether the city was being especially polluting that day.

Garbage cans that knew when they were full. Little robots underground that could shepherd garbage back and forth. Really tried to look at all of the parts of a city and how you could take technology to really just solve all those little challenges and annoyances and struggles of daily life. I think I read something about self-melting sidewalks too, right? Yeah, really. I mean, you know, taking ideas like how do you make a city more functional throughout the year? So sidewalks that can heat up and melt the snow away or awnings that can sort of come out from buildings and cover sidewalks when it rains so you can bike more days of the year.

Stuff like that, that there's a technology component, but there's also sort of a, I guess, urbanist slant that all of this is wrapped in. In a way, this sounds like a futuristic utopia. But this promise, this concept that Sidewalk Labs presented, you know, how real is this vision? It feels like some of this stuff is just far, far out. I don't think anyone looked at that and thought, wow, Sidewalk's going to be able to do all of this. But I think within that was supposed to be this sort of, it was supposed to get people excited. It was supposed to say to people, look, like city building doesn't have to be boring. And this doesn't have to take a billion years.

And we could actually do something that's cool and forward thinking and magical. Okay, so look, we've addressed a lot of the potentially fantastic things about a city of the future. And in Toronto, which feels like this city could be at the front of something special. But I also want to talk to you today about some of the concerns here. So with smarter cities, that also means obviously finding better ways to collect, analyze, and respond to data. How would some of that work in a city? So the way that Sidewalk has been pitching it is there's sort of two types of data collection that will occur. There's sort of more personal types of data. So things that require the city

or its services to know maybe who you are or information that's considered personal. And they say, no, you know what, there's not going to be a lot of that happening. They say that rather the larger amount of data that's going to be collected is what they're calling sort of a nebulous term, urban data, which is essentially what they're using to refer to anything that they're kind of collecting from, you know, the larger city fabric or the ecosystem. It's data that wouldn't identify you in theory. It's data that wouldn't be able to be linked back to you.

But it's stuff that would give city planners or others who hook into this city's kind of data layer the ability to look at, you know, how many people are crossing this intersection at a particular type of day or, you day or how often are the garbage cans being full or maybe you want to get access to all of the air quality data, right? This is data that in theory, Sidewalk is saying, well, that wouldn't be personally identifiable. It would just be information about the city and how people use the city and how city life progresses.

But certainly there would be a lot of it. And there would be the potential to make money off of it. And there's lots of questions about how that data is going to be controlled. Who's going to have governance over it? Who's going to decide how it's collected? Where it's stored? Who it can be shared with? How people can make money off of it?

where it's stored, who it can be shared with, how people can make money off of it. And even further back from this is also just this concern about, like, what data are we even comfortable with this city, this neighborhood, with Sidewalk and the companies that it works with collecting in the first place, right? Right. And we've seen this year in particular a lot of cases where people did not anticipate the amount of data being collected on them. And so is it possible that even though Sidewalk Labs says that they're not going to use this data to identify people, like, how do we even know that that's true?

You know, people, I think, since the beginning of this process have been asking for more specifics about certainly its business model. So Sidewalk has provided some bits of information. They say that they could make money off of, for example, the real estate that they could potentially buy or own or rent out. They could make money off of sort of the infrastructure. So maybe, you know, operating the self-driving cars and things like that. They could make money off of the data, right? Some of this data that's collected, right? So certainly they've said that they're not going to use the data that's collected for advertising purposes. But there's still this larger question of, well, how could that data be monetized? Do you have any sense of how it could be monetized? I don't think we really know.

And I think that's some of what is difficult about these conversations is we're still speaking so much in the abstract. And there's a bit of a tension here, right? There's a tension taking place because you have a private company really doing a lot of the work around setting the terms of how they will be able to build this city, right? I mean, the city, through Waterfront Toronto, that government agency, they put out this sort of request for plans, for proposals, for development plans. And Sidewalk came in and has been working on this development plan with Waterfront Toronto, but there's been questions around, well, how much of this is really a partnership versus Sidewalk Labs really kind of leading the discussion around things like privacy and things like monetization, like intellectual property around sort of like really just the policies here or could Waterfront Toronto and even the city of Toronto itself be doing more to really kind of set the terms around how we're going to protect people's privacy, how we're going to handle the collection and retention and sharing of data? Is this going to be something where Sidewalk Labs comes away as ultimately kind of the winner in terms of money or is this something that everyone here is going to benefit from? There's a lot of these questions that I think for a long time remained unanswered. Sidewalk has tried to answer some of this with – they released recently a couple of weeks back

this data use kind of governance policy proposal, this proposal around how data will be collected, where it's going to be stored, who's going to be having access to it. But I think for a lot of people, it really just kind of raised more questions and certainly more concerns. Right. And I think, too, I can see the concerns that would swirl around essentially taking this responsibility of city building, which is historically a civic responsibility committed by elected officials who are ultimately responsible to the voters, taking it away from them. One of the big concerns is just how much influence Sidewalk Labs has in this process. Should we be allowing Sidewalk to really dictate the terms of so many things? So how has this been playing out in the city of Toronto?

Certainly there has been opposition from local critics, academics, privacy advocates, city governance folks, right, who are critical, I think, of how this deal was put together, right? This initial deal and the amount of latitude it gave Sidewalk Toronto over making money off the intellectual property that comes from this project, right? So if Sidewalk Labs invents a bunch of stuff or purchases a bunch of new technology for this, do they get the exclusive rights off of this? Do they get to make all the money off of this? So that was one of the big kind of concerns that was raised certainly by folks like Jim Pelsilli, the former co-founder of BlackBerry Research in Motion.

There are local advocates, people like Bianca Wiley and Sadia Muzaffar, who have really I think been also raising concerns around the governance of this project, right? Is Waterfront Toronto playing a big enough role in determining how things go forward and how this whole plan is being developed? Or are we really kind of turning over a lot of these decisions to a private company that exists to make money for its shareholders at some point? I am more questioning what Waterfront Toronto as a steward for the residents of Toronto should have done in this process. have done in this process. And when you talk about the economic upside of data, then why don't we as a city and residents have that conversation of if there is so much value, why aren't we the benefactors? You're also seeing pushback from advisors to this project as well. So we've already seen some high profile resignations. Sadi Muzaffar was on a Waterfront Toronto digital advisory panel, and she had misgivings about Waterfront Toronto's role in really helping guide this process. And she took a step back. We've seen other people raise concerns and threaten to take a step back if Waterfront didn't provide and Sidewalk didn't provide more information about sort of the data governance and data use policy.

more information about sort of the data governance and data use policy. And even after Sidewalk released information about its plans, we saw Ann Kavoukian. She was formerly the Ontario Privacy and Information Commissioner and advisor on this project to Sidewalk Labs. And she stepped back because of what was contained in that proposal. She didn't like certain provisions that Sidewalk had put into place around how data would be de-anodized, where it would be de-identified. Wirefront Toronto has to make it clear, lay down the law, the data must be de-identified at source. And they have to say that to all parties involved. And I thought, I must resign because right now I have no influence over this.

So certainly a bunch of people have raised concerns. They've come out against the project. They've resigned from their critic positions related to this project. And those are just some of the most recent developments we've seen happen. And it's really in stark opposition to, I think, how this project started, which was, oh, my goodness, we're going to have this magical, futuristic, fancy new tech city land here in Toronto. And now that everyone's had a little bit of time to think about what that really means for Toronto, for the company making this proposal, for its citizens, I think we've started to see a little bit more nuanced and fierce pushback and critique about what's on offer, certainly.

One more issue that I've been struggling about, I'd be really interested to hear your thoughts, is this concept of opting in or opting out. So it's becoming increasingly difficult to sort of opt out of the internet. But generally, I can opt out of a lot of things. I can not be on Facebook. I can not be on social media. But the city feels like you have no choice. If you were anywhere near it, you would automatically be opting in. And have you heard any concerns about that? So on the one hand, people will

respond to that by saying, well, hang on, there's already a lot of that happening in cities. I mean, you go to places like London, and it's just saturated with with closed circuit television cameras, surveillance cameras everywhere, even in cities like Toronto, right? I mean, people might be surprised to learn that when you drive through the city, there's little sensors that are placed along some streets that basically look for the pings that emanate from your phone, right? And that's how they tell how busy roads are, how fast people are traveling between intersections, things like that. So there's already a certain amount of pervasive tracking and data collection that's already

taking place. And the reason why this is allowed is because generally it's not being done in an identifying way, right? Or some sort of notice that's being placed that says that this is allowed is because generally it's not being done in an identifying way, right? Or some sort of notice that's being placed that says that this is occurring. The flip side of that, though, and what makes the smart city context so interesting and I think scary to people and potentially really different, what really ratchets up the level of intensity is just the number of sensors we're talking about, the rate at which they're capturing data, the amount of data we're talking about. So we're really kind of going beyond what exists today, where maybe it's, you know, a couple cameras around an intersection. You know, at the same time, this is the future.

This is where technology is headed. It also does make people's lives easier. So what does Sidewalk Labs have to say about all of this? Their argument at this point is that everything is still in flux, right? They're still figuring this stuff out. They're still working on the master development plan. They're still figuring this stuff out. They're still working on the master development plan.

This is why they continue to have these roundtables and public sessions so that people can ask questions and provide feedback and input and things like that. And they are very much of the position that what they are trying to do is make cities better. They're trying to make people's lives better. They think that certainly the fact that they are an alphabet company gives them access to just so much talent and technology that is really unparalleled and so allows them to bring all this to bear with this singular goal of making all facets of city life better. They're just saying they're just trying to build a better city. Yeah. They're of the mind that, look, like we're not up to anything nefarious or malicious here. We're just here to make things better.

I'm Jesse Chapins, and I'm the director of public realm at Sidewalk Labs, and I also have led the effort around this 307 space, which is our experimental workspace here in Toronto. experimental workspace here in Toronto. Sidewalk has been very clear in our commitment to privacy by design and de-identification of data at the source. I think what we have also been clear and what we put forward is a concept that we would like to see an independent entity, a civic data trust, that is not ourselves and that is sort of operating clearly and kind of jurisdictionally in the public interest that is responsible for managing that collection and use

of data. It's not that any technology in and of itself is going to make cities better or worse. It's not that any technology is going to make society better or worse. It's how we shepherd them and how that includes how we work in concert with the public sector and policy and design of our streets and the whole system so that the benefits can be achieved. So what's next here? Where does this go from here? So at this point, Sidewalk hasn't been given a green light to do anything. Right.

We're really talking hypotheticals right now. Still talking hypotheticals. And we've been talking hypotheticals for a while and probably a while longer because they are working with Waterfront Toronto on what's called a master development plan. They haven't been given the green light to build anything. We're not even talking about sort of this larger kind of area of the portlands that Waterfront Toronto has on offer. It's just a small little, you know, few acres large plot called Quayside. And so at this point,

they're just working on this plan. And that final plan still has to be signed off by Waterfront Toronto and by the city of Toronto. And when will that happen? We will not expect to see this plan until early 2019 is the most recent. That's been pushed as well. We were originally supposed to see it in the fall. They've been given more time because they say, well, we want to make sure that we're doing this right. We don't want to, we don't want to rush into this. And so sometime next year, but it remains to be seen exactly when. Okay. And when it does, you'll come back on? I will be here to talk about it more. Thanks so much, Matt. Thanks, Jamie.

I'm Jamie Poisson. Thanks for listening to FrontBurner. See you tomorrow. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts. It's 2011 and the Arab Spring is raging. A lesbian activist in Syria starts a blog. She names it Gay Girl in Damascus. Am I crazy? Maybe. As her profile grows, so does the danger.

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