Tomorrow's cities: Google's Toronto city built 'from the internet up'
bbc.com
bbc.com
NYCLU and Columbia University have a 2016 video (starts at 2:50) about the corporate origins and privacy policy of Google's LinkNYC surveillance kiosks in Manhattan:
https://livestream.com/internetsociety/hopeconf/videos/13081...
Village Voice covered the topic, https://www.villagevoice.com/2016/07/06/google-is-transformi...
This freedom to opt out entirely is also the last argument that spokespeople for LinkNYC and the city itself fall back upon when challenged with privacy concerns: If you don’t like it, you’re welcome not to use it. It’s a disheartening place to land, especially when discussing infrastructure that’s supposed to be serving people who aren’t served otherwise. To Moglen, it’s simply an unacceptable conclusion. “That’s what they want us to believe, that we have a choice between isolation and monitored connecting,” he says. “Those are not adequate choices in a 21st-century world: We are designing the net to track you — if you don’t like it, don’t use it. The human race is shifting to a fully surveilled and monitored superorganism — if you don’t like that, stop being human. That’s a poor outcome. The United States is a society that was based around the idea that human beings can have liberty. So give us liberty! And don’t tell us that otherwise we can have the death of the net.
There so many things we already have enough data to act on, college debt is going to crush the next generation, middle class wages have been stagnant for 30 years, money is continuing to concentrate to the select few giving them unmatched powers in politics... we can act on any one of those things for the cost of the tax break just passed!
That isn't the way the wind is blowing though, apparently the only road to better our lives is just surrendering more and more power to corporations who know so much better than us, and whatever tools we elect, how to solve our woes.
I'm not really convinced. There's income-based repayment and other options for federal loans if you can't afford payments. You can even pay nothing for a while, and after that, income-based payments will be affordable even with a minimum wage job. All this assuming you couldn't find anything better with your degree.
How sustainable do you think those programs are when the majority of your working citizens need subsidy?
“They are working hard to get you to behave true to your statistical profile, and in doing so they reduce your spontaneity, your anomalous behavior, your human agency, as they try to get you to conform to the most marketable probable outcome.”
This seems like a good place that GDPR could help consumers out - but how far can it be taken? What if I don't consent for the sidewalk to track me, the cars near me to film me and record me so that they can drive autonomously, the CCTV cameras and microphones near every intersection to record me and run facial recognition on me, and so on. It seems the only way to not be tracked is to not exist.
I hope that we eventually attain some great regulations in this area that really tackle these problems in the areas that are most pressing and difficult to regulate. Would be wonderful to see some progress within the next few years in this area, perhaps GDPR will set the stage here.
"I've heard that the meetings are very slick productions but that they don't go far in addressing the concerns held by members of the public, who want to know the details of what is in the agreement."
I admit Sidewalk's approach is a bit questionable here, but why not go to their meetings and ask questions instead of "I heard this and that"?
First - to give some self-serving private enterprise such leeway in our communities - can you imagine 'McDonalds' creating an entire neighbourhood to server their interests of fast food? "Hey, everything is centered around food deliver machines, delivering healthy, happy food quickly!"
Second - Google has shown that they are remarkably out of touch with social reality of communities. Even their product attempts in social - Google+ for example, it's like they fail to understand really what they are doing, and focus everything around an algorithm.
Even when governments get into major urban planning they 'screw it up' - the suburbs of Toronto have 'wide streets' and 'plenty of green' and 'highways' but they have absolutely no culture or community. TO suburbs are designed for box stores, starbuckses, Olive Gardens and car sales lots.
Communities are built around people and culture, the notion that they want to build something 'from the internet up' is laughable and scary.
And to wit - we don't even know what that specifically means. They've just committed to doing something 'Googly'.
This kind of futurism/utopianism has been tried so often, have a look at any of the old school world expos. When all is said and done, we generally prefer to opt to live in classical old-timey communities like mid-sized European cities (and from other places with history), where technology is added to solve specific problems, not the other way around.
But politicians are easily charmed, and desperate communities (under-served by their elected officials) easily seduced.
I would personally prefer measures to reduce the (negative) impact of government on cost of living, to measures which inherently increase it, but voices like mine tend to be crowded out by "urbanists" and "technologists" who think they know precisely what is best for all of us.
The water quality has also improved to the point where it's safe to swim in the water [3] and the beaches meet the blue flag criteria for the last few years [4, 5].
1: http://urbantoronto.ca/database/projects/lower-don-lands-red...
2: http://urbantoronto.ca/news/2016/11/preliminary-plans-reveal...
3: http://app.toronto.ca/tpha/beaches.html
4: https://environmentaldefence.ca/blue-flag/
5: https://www.toronto.ca/health/swimsafe/beaches_blueflag.htm
Toronto is very civic, the busses run, it 'has everything', it's 'safe', the cops are ok, etc etc..
But communities are organic, you can't just invent them out of nowhere, or construct them.
To boot - the waterfront is rather close to a massive highway, and downtown traffic etc. - tough place to do something from scratch.
Granted, having lived directly overlooking said freeway, I can tell you that it is so structurally unsound that I can't imagine it standing for many more years. The supports and roadway are literally falling off in chunks.
This is really hard to do when people want to huddle in their cars/offices/homes/underground for 5 months of the year. Toronto winters are no joke.
There's a reason why the underground network (The Path) is so big.
My question for these people would be how can we audit the systems for privacy concerns, and how exactly would one create a development that plugs into this smart city.
I believe ultimately this can result in a much improved city. But since they seem to not be answering those questions I mentioned appropriately at the moment and they are so important, I think that all legal or other pressures available should be applied until good answers come out. To me the current activity seems to have completely subverted government and the public trust. Since government tends to be obsolete, I can see how that might be a tendency. But I think the solution will need to eventually be a high tech government rather than a bunch of secret dealings that bypass an outdated one.
(1) Proposed bike lanes are being moved to a side street, against recommendations & usage data - for an extra $20M https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2018/02/26/yonge-st-bike-la...
(2) Many restauranteurs claiming their business is down 50% plus, despite credit & debit receipts showing an increase. (During a Pilot project to decrease variability in LRT times & increase speed of the busiest surface line in North America) https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/transportation/2018/02/16/s...
(3) Building a $3.3B one stop subway instead of a LRT that would better serve the community. https://www.thestar.com/news/city_hall/2018/02/06/updated-sc...
And we want to allow a private company to collect data that has a vested interest in nothing but advertising. Our issue with governance in our cities has never been lack of data, it's lack of leadership and poor NIMBY decision making.
Hopefully if I get some unincorporated land somewhere in New England, I won't have the "urbanists" knocking on my door with a bill to pay for all the "urbanism" they've so graciously done for me.
Though when MK w built it was planned with different housing types some where for workers some for supervisors and some for executives.
Focused on system automation and data and not so much the tech debt being created.
Self-driving cars have turned into just another buzzword, which is a damn shame.
They simply understood that people won't give up their comfort.
Keep in mind that there isn't much money to be made selling subway cars.
> The area will have plenty of sensors collecting data - from traffic, noise and air quality - and monitoring the performance of the electric grid and waste collection.
...
> Sidewalk Labs told the BBC that the sensors will not be used to monitor and collect information on citizens, rather it will be used to allow governments to be flexible about how neighbourhoods are used.
Those two sentences are not compatible. The sensors will be used to observe - surveil - citizens in cars, citizens talking and at the same time, won't be used to monitor or collect information about citizens? How?
Does Google have any plans to describe how they will eliminate human-spoken conversations from their noise detection? Such work can be done. Will they do it? That seems like Problem #1 to address: Google claims they will shove microphones along the streets everywhere but "promise us they won't listen to you"........okay? I don't buy it for a second. Talk to us about it, at least, and don't just say "we promise not to monitor human speech" and leave it at that. This is a hugely important conversation and Google is ignoring it. You can't just plaster public space with corporate surveillance tools and then walk around whistling and ignoring the huge social movement against your never-ending privacy invasion.
> What is clear is that green will be top of the agenda
None of the proposal sounds green to me. The amount of effort that will go into building it seems likely to offset any gains it would save over time through pollution reduction, etc.
The entire thing sounds like it would need new factories, new dedicated infrastructure, and none of it is remotely green-sounding. Where will all of this stuff come from? Is it truly better and less pollutant than an old-world, more simple solution might be?
I'm hopeful for Sidewalk Labs. But it seems like the Reddit Redesign to me: making every single obvious mistake that you could make, while the outside world yells at you "please reddit don't be digg 2.0! please Google don't make a massive dystopian total-surveillance society! please!)
I am very much not a fan of this project, but I will point out that the problem you're describing has an easy solution; a microphone can record conversations, but the output of a microphone can be fed to an algorithm that never keeps that recording and only records the noise level in dB.
If you've ever used a toilet that flushes itself automatically when you leave, you've been in a bathroom with a tiny camera watching you. No one ever worries about the privacy implications of this, because that tiny camera does nothing with this information except decide if it's light or dark immediately in front of it. The image data isn't stored, it's just thrown away.
Is Google going to record thousands of hours of sidewalk microphone recordings and store them somewhere? Seems far more likely they're just going to stream a "Currently it's 60dB at this intersection"; meets their requirements with minimal bandwidth and infrastructure.
Why would you use as camera as the sensor for simple presence detection? An IR LED+photoresistor is much cheaper.
> No one ever worries about the privacy implications of this
Yes, I certainly would be suspicious of both the camera and the attached microprocessor needed to "decide if it's light or dark" from "image data". Anybody that chooses to pay for that kind of massive over-engineering instead of using a cheap IR emitter+detector is trying to do more than just flush the toilet.
> Is Google going to record thousands of hours of sidewalk microphone recordings and store them somewhere?
Why not? It's a trivial[1] amount of data after you apply a simple noise gate and a low bandwidth codec.
You mean... A tiny camera? A photoresistor is a device which measures light hitting it. It's a 1-pixel camera. In exactly the same way a decibelmeter is a little microphone.
My point is, OP is looking for some complicated algorithm to detect and eliminate speech, but you don't need that - you can just eliminate pretty much everything in the first place.
> Why not? It's a trivial[1] amount of data after you apply a simple noise gate and a low bandwidth codec.
5.6kbit/s to record noise levels is like using a CCD camera and a microprocessor for image detection. You could sample the noise level once every 10 minutes, store it in a uint32, and you'd get 5.6kbit/hundred days. You could ship the data over an SMS link. The units could be battery powered and last months.
> Is Google going to record thousands of hours of sidewalk microphone recordings and store them somewhere? Seems far more likely they're just going to stream a "Currently it's 60dB at this intersection"; meets their requirements with minimal bandwidth and infrastructure.
It "seems" to you that Google will actively choose to not record data that would be considered invasive. That's not good enough, though. First, it doesn't seem that way to me at all, I completely disagree with how much data I would expect Google to collect in this situation, and I completely disagree that a dB reading at a lat,lng point will be sufficient for Google's algorithms to do their required work.
Again, the main point I'm trying to bring is not the technical issues, but the societal ones. It is too much surveillance issued directly to a company with no regard for discussing the issues openly. It's just not right.
I think you are reading more into it than you should.
No, I certainly propose a city should measure it. I propose it be done with taxpayer dollars, open source software, and in an otherwise fully open and democratic way by the city.
I do not think corporations should build themselves into cities with a specific plan for surveillance in mind.
> There is a difference between gathering aggregate data about a neighborhood, and individual surveillance.
Not much of one, depending on the neighborhood and how the data is collected. We're all told that the employees at Google, Facebook, etc have very limited access to customer data, but that oversight is also very unknown and opaque to the outside world, and not trusted. I'm certainly not ready to trust Google with an idea of "no individual surveillance" in their city, when obviously as soon as I go in their with my Android phone they know who I am anyway.
> I think you are reading more into it than you should.
No way. Google is showing their ambitions at running human society in a very closed, scary, surveillance-enabled way. If anything I'm reading too little into their plans.
This, I agree with. Google is not in this for the "public good".
I know people who are ranked very highly in the Google maps "guide" program. I wonder what kind of witchcraft Google uses to get people to spend hundreds of hours donating information about their cities in order to improve a proprietary map program for free. -_-
I don't see the big deal about microphones used for decibel measuremrnts potentially being used to keep audio. Companies record video and audio outside their premises all the time.
It's this kind of tone-deafness I was trying to describe in how Google talks about their plans. Yes, I'm aware that companies do that kind of surveillance on their own property. But what Google is trying to here is test out how to build entire cities. Surely you see the important difference and user expectation when it comes to a very clearly designed and secured corporate building or campus vs. an entire section of a residential and commercial city.