Google’s smart city dream is turning into a privacy nightmare | Hacker News Reader

Google’s smart city dream is turning into a privacy nightmare

engadget.com

200 pointsnew_guy62 comments

If you cut out the editorializing and just focus on the example presented, it seems totally reasonable:

1. As a private company, they don't believe they should be responsible with setting public policy. They want a separate board to be set up for that.

2. By default, everything should be private.

3. They're proposing that if an applicant has a compelling reason to access raw data, they need to have it approved by the governing board, and raw data is automatically destroyed after a short interval.

They gave the example of video feeds, which are both common in public spaces and are not anonymous (even if you blur faces). If they're being thoughtful and responsible, they need some mechanism to handle desirable exceptions. This sounds like a proposal to do so.

In the article, the person who resigned is presented as a respected expert on the subject. Maybe that person has more context that didn't make it into the article. But the facts presented - "group designing public space is proposing policy to handle aspects that can't easily be made anonymous" - don't warrant the clickbait title or the editorialization.

Sounds like Sidewalk is doing it's diligence - thinking about the things a group designing a "city of the future" _should_ be thinking about.

> In the article, the person who resigned is presented as a respected expert on the subject. Maybe that person has more context that didn't make it into the article.

it’s not a context thing, it’s (as the article makes clear) a complete disagreement over your point #3. She does not believe the trust should be empowered to hold the de-anonymized raw data at all or grant acccess to it to any party at all, over concerns that it is both too valuable a hacking target and that companies will be incentivized to ask for as much data as they can get whether or not they “need” it. She has little faith in the ability of contracts to enforce data access and deletion policies on private companies (nor should she, in my opinion, as we’ve seen how little impact they had on restraining the (mis-)use of Facebook data)

It's pretty much impossible to recall the raw data once it's out in the wild.

The problem with #3 is that they _already_ doing that with the fisa courts and it's a shit show. In our current system, they rubber stamp every warrant that is presented to the court with no oversight[0].

[0]:https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/06/president-obama-called...

Toronto, the city mentioned in the article, is in Canada. "Fisa courts" are a U.S. entity which has nothing to do with what is being done in Canada.

Until the data gets sent to US servers.

^This. "5 eyes" Canada, US, UK, NZ, and AUS

and so even if the fisa courts said no, the data would still arrive

well then ignore fisa courts because the US just does whatever the hell it wants with non-US citizens. that makes the point even more prescient

Who wants to be the judge who didn't rubber stamp that one warrant that if executed would have stopped the next 9/11? There is no bureaucratic incentive to do anything but approve everything.

I'm not sure it always makes sense to evaluate company policy in the present tense.

Sometimes its like they want to put their arm behind the couch to relax. Then they let their hand rest on your shoulder. Then it creeps down a little further.

Do you have to wait for the hand to actually touch something sensitive to try to put a stop to it?

Ah yes, the slippery grope fallacy.

Exactly. If data is the currency of the future, and we're too conservative about permitting experiments, we'll lose out on a lot of innovation. What if a smart city encourages more walking? What if it has less pollution? What about all the people who die prematurely living in today's cities for these reasons?

After experimenting, then we as a society can decide not to permit something, not before.

As an analogy, what if burning fossil fuels were banned worldwide in 1900 because people were too conservative about pollution? We all agree that pollution is bad, but we should be willing to permit some amount of negative side effects if we want progress. Otherwise, we'd still be living in medieval times.

If mind-probing is the currency of the future, and we're too conservative about permitting experiments, we'll lose out on a lot of innovation.

I mean, yes. You don't read Neuroscience I guess. Governments do the same with self driving cars, can allowing limited experiments so they can encourage scientific and economic innovation.

To be honest, I don't quite understand what smart city even means. This term is so board and include so much different aspect of life that I am not sure what it includes. It is a cool marketing term, but does not explain too much what is happening.

So, I have read some of the use cases. One of them is putting a sensor in a garbage bin, so that the sensor could take picture of the garbage and determine where they should go. I don't think this is smart. Japan has already been very efficient on garbage collection, because Japanese people just separate different type of garbage themselves, and fine people who don't. A policy could just fix this in a cost effective way, not some sensor. But the spirit here is placing a camera to see what it could do.

Some other project like improving the accuracy of water meter to detect water usage and pinpoint leaks. They admit it already exists, and only improvement is required.

I could conclude that it is a debate about who could put an IoT or sensor in the public area. Google just wants to place those IoT in the city to see what they could do with it. Basically a web crawler in physical world. The government may also want to create a hype so that people would approve infrastructure funding to improve existing infrastructure people don't think it's that smart.

Am I missing something here?

I just assumed it would be a more Orwellian version of the old “Company Towns.” In addition it would be a big laboratory to test what people will accept and how much personal information can be gleaned from those sensors and related analysis.

To me, the word "smart" applied to anything but a human has now gained a negative connotation: "it's smarter than you and can work against you." Plenty of dystopian science fiction to support that view too, but scary that now it's actually becoming reality.

I think there's two ways things can be smart without being invasive. Either it can be smart, but not personalized, such as monitoring general traffic flow and making changes to accommodate (some express lanes on highways, for example, switch direction based on the time of day), or it can be personalized, but private to you. Most smarthome devices wouldn't be a problem if they remained entirely onsite in your possession. Obviously the former is a way a city could be smart, but the latter is really not.

I want a smart city to shut off lights that aren't illuminating anything or to optimize trash collection routes based on efficiency. I don't want a smart city watching where I, personally, go and suggesting I do things based on that.

some express lanes on highways, for example, switch direction based on the time of day

shut off lights that aren't illuminating anything

These are examples of existing technology which most people don't consider "smart" --- the word is reserved more for the new technologies that also contain pervasive data collection.

You could automate these sorts of processes using data collected live, just in aggregate. Rather than say, a simple light sensor on a street lamp, you could note where cars are on the road, and illuminate a series of them ahead of any given vehicle so they can see in front them. Or a road could dynamically reconfigure itself based on traffic flow, rearrange lanes around accidents, etc. These are processes that would require data collection, processing, and automated control of a equipment along the road.

My point isn't in the specific examples but that there are smart, computerized features that absolutely could be built that may improve lives or create efficiency that don't involve personal profiling.

>These are examples of existing technology which most people don't consider "smart"

Applying them more universally than they're currently applied would do a hell of a lot to make dumb cities seem smarter.

It's curious that there hasn't been any backlash against non-tech companies for this stuff. E.g. something like airmiles, where your entire purchase history is sent to advertisers. No one gets up in arms, despite how sensitive that data is.

That's not to say people shouldn't be concerned with their privacy, but it's a weird double standard.

That's probably because it's not so obvious so many just don't know about it.

There was for a while; the most prominent story I can remember is a Target point card figuring out a woman was pregnant: https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-targ...

The problem is that if airlines ever takes away your airmiles points because your bought a leonardo di caprio fake poster from aliexpress I wouldn't miss them at all. I would just delete their email and move on.

The issue with Google is that they can ban you from all their services for "trying to act oversmart". I know startups that had their whole gmail/drive/docs suspended and everything purged because one of their dev had a banned account. My colleague had his google account banned because he resold the pixel (http://fortune.com/2016/11/17/google-pixel-ban/)

I had one account banned because they did not allow paypal after they launched google wallet. And they banned a second account for being "related to first account"

Because google does not have customer support for gmail/drive they run amok with the ban hammer. If you don't mind being suspended for all google accounts for absurd reasons then yes you are right, this is a non-issue.

I don’t think it’s possible for a private company to have the public’s interest at heart, at least in the long term. Especially for Google, who have shown a lack of respect and privacy for its users.

> I don’t think it’s possible for a private company to have the public’s interest at heart, at least in the long term. Especially for Google, who have shown a lack of respect and privacy for its users.

While I agree in general with this sentiment, do you think non-profit corporations are in the same boat? Or something like the FDIC?

>do you think non-profit corporations are in the same boat?

There are really bad non-profits, I've worked at them. However, endless search for endless profit by shareholders, CEO's, and executives is usually the cause of a loss of morals and ethics. I think it's nearly impossible for very large corporations making profits to do actual good for society except give us endless growth with products and services we really don't need. This doesn't mean a small local bakery taking in profits isn't doing the community good, but extremely large corporations don't benefit the same way.

https://www.npr.org/2014/10/29/359365276/on-superstorm-sandy...

The Red Cross is worse than many for profits. If a for-profit doesn’t deliver the goods, they don’t get paid: they are incentivized to do what their customers want. The Red Cross is incentivized to bring in donations even at the expense of their stated purpose. Look at the salary of the Red Cross CEO — a salary paid by tax deductible donations. Look at the corrupt nonsense engaged in by many universities. To suggest non-profits have any better or worse ethics than for profits is a vast over simplification. The Clinton Foundation even paid for Chelsea Clinton’s wedding as well as private jet transport by principles. Even Greenpeace’s leader was commuting by airplane.

Well, it’s actually quite easy: if you care about profit, your morals are necessarily compromised. You are right that non-profits have other incentives as well, but expecting a for profit organization to have morals is inherently going to disappoint your expectation every time.

Nope. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2017/01/...

I'd argue it's way more possible for a private company to have the public's interest at heart than a public company. Obviously a company needs to make money to survive, but the necessity to make enough profit to survive as a company doesn't preclude any kind of public interest; the two aren't mutually exclusive.

Unfortunately, they do often overlap a lot less than they should, often just so the company can make even more money. It could be argued that there's some bigger picture ploy in the form of "if we make more money, we could help more", but obviously this gets into a case-by-case basis analyzing companies -- some fit the mold of having the public's interest at heart, and some don't, but all of them are on a spectrum both for public interest _and_ how well they implement it.

This is completely disregarding the fact that what is "right" for "public interest" varies from person to person. One person of the public might very much want total surveillance and one might not want anything to do with technology at all -- is building something for either really in the public interest? The common sense answer is no: "public interest" defines what the _majority_ of people want (which has its own issues), but even that changes over time.

It seems like most of the private companies who act in the public's interest are newer ones that are either run by a founder, or still influenced by the original founders ideas from not long ago. Does anybody know of any good counter-examples off hand? A lot of older/larger corporation have pretty bad reputations

(I guess I mean as core business practices, not just "we had a good quarter and can hire some extra interns to give them a start in their careers / donate to that art exhibit")

>It seems like most of the private companies who act in the public's interest are newer ones that are either run by a founder, or still influenced by the original founders ideas from not long ago.

Have any examples of private companies who act in the public's interest? I can't think of any.

I'm pretty much convinced that the greatest threat to true freedom is pervasive monitoring. It is impossible to resist any powerful force when they know everything you say and do. They can simply undermine any activity. I realized this when my buddies were telling me about their work on facial recognition for WalMart stores. And then read about how WalMart finds reasons to fire everybody who had contact with union organizers. That is just the tip of the iceburg, as the powerful will get better and better at both monitoring and control - without our awareness that we are being controlled.

Also the studies on how pervasive monitoring causes self-censorship. Probably everyone here has had the experience where they've typed out a comment, then thought about whether they want that on their "permanent record", then decided not to post. It's insidious.

The whole point of these devices is data harvesting. The Times op-ed last September titled These Are Not The Robots We Were Promised [0] covers the discrepancy between our expectations of personal assistants and the reality they came to be.

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/09/opinion/sunday/household-...

“These devices..”

Except HomePod. Alexa and Google Home harvest data; HomePod does not. The purpose of HomePod is to sell HomePod, other Apple devices and subscriptions to Apple Music. The purpose of Alexa and Google Home is to learn about you in order to sell or exploit that information.

It’s a critical difference. People complain about how Siri isn’t as good as XYZ, yet simultaneously complain about the privacy implications of the “good” assistants.

Any "smart city" is going to turn into a privacy nightmare as soon as it goes beyond the depersonalized level. I.e. it should analyze traffic patterns and optimize traffic lights but should never know who exactly is and is going where. Personalized features should not be offered even on voluntary opt-in basis as this will make the people who don't opt-in a target for prejudice.

Google isn't really evil, they just do what they can get away with. In the European Union that isn't a whole lot. In the US there are no limitations. And god only knows what China will allow.

That sounds pretty evil to me.

"doing whatever they can get away with" feels like a pretty reasonable definition for at least one type of evil in my book.

law-abiding evil.

People go to work in what are essentially private authoritarian governments, now they want to fully live under one too? This reads like an Orwell book. The fact that such a major privacy issue is arising so soon should doom the project for good.

Also, the fact that people blindly accept that companies somehow still have to work like authotarian goverments from old ages is mind boggling.

Especially in the US, there is a massive lack of employee discourse inside the company.

When you have almost 80% of the population living paycheck to paycheck [1] with practically nobody in that percentage with a significant savings [2], and workplace laws where you can be fired for literally anything, you can easily stifle workplace unionization efforts and discourse. People literally cannot afford to do anything that would benefit them.

This article is about Canada, but it's really becoming a worldwide issue.

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2017/08/24/most-americans-live-paycheck...

[2] https://www.cnbc.com/2018/01/18/few-americans-have-enough-sa...

It also seems like a cultural issue to me. Americans seem so opposed to the idea of labour unions and workplace councils, because it somehow "hurts companies"?

it is probably for historical reasons of the cold war, but fascinating nonetheless.

It's definitely somewhat anti-left sentiments built into our culture/society through means such as mccarthyism and anti-communism, as well as purposeful lack of education. It's also our media and entertainment. These tactics can be further learned about in Chomsky's 'Manufacturing Consent'.

“Smart” stuff is great, but really requires third party governance and regulation.

It’s possible, just based on what you can buy for commercial smart building systems. But it adds cost as you cannot sell devices at a loss and farm revenue based on selling data.

So it's pretty safe to say this vid from The Onion made a few years ago has become reality.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lMChO0qNbkY

What a time to be alive.

The Onion was also prescient about the end game for surveillance based companies:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w8c_m6U1f9o

(this video is especially interesting in light of Google's recent involvement in Chinese censorship)

Holy shit, thats a good one aswell. Bookmarked. Thanks!

Here's an interesting discussion involving many of the players directly involved in the project. Ann Cavoukian from the Engadget article is on this.

https://youtu.be/-2C2_ulRrXE

Actually, what's really interesting is to compare her outlook from earlier this year https://youtu.be/oEyBjYNgaMY

> An independent trust, the team argues, would be better equipped to make these decisions -- even if they allow other companies to collect personally identifiable data.

Why should anyone trust an "independent trust"? That trust will be staffed by humans, subject to all human failings and conflicts of interest.

Don't many cities already have govt cameras with no anonymous-ization? Traffic cameras feed into CalTrans in California.

For cameras in public places, the video shouldn't be used for profit. But should the police have access to the raw footage? Amber alerts? Terrorism?

turning into? it was doomed from the start. this kind of issue was completely predictable.

A google led smart city project and they were expecting privacy by design?

Either very naive or very stupid...

I read the title and immediately thought: 'duh!'

Wow, what a surprise with a privacy focused company like Google.

Turning into? That's assuming Google didn't intend it to be that by design.

That's what Google does. They're spending money trying to find the next thing...their interests do not align yours.

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