Google's Sidewalk Labs plans private taxation, cops, judges, punishes privacy

boingboing.net

18 points·throwaway2048··4 comments

I think the Globe and Mail article referenced at the end [0] is a much better source. The BoingBoing article has less info and as far as I can tell their claims that these ideas are/were planned for the Toronto development is unsubstantiated. The globe and mail article quotes a spokesperson as stating:

"Many, if not most, of the ideas it contains were never under consideration for Toronto or discussed with Waterfront Toronto and governments."

It's definitely concerning that Sidewalk Labs ever had (or currently has) some of these ideas as part of their vision but it's not helpful to sensationalize or misrepresent the actual plans for Toronto.

[0] https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/article-sidewalk-la...

We gutted most of their plan:

> restricting development to the 12-acre Quayside plot, acknowledging that an outside developer will have to be chosen to build the infrastructure, abandoning a transit line as a precondition and handing over governance of all data collection to Waterfront Toronto.

From https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2019/10/31/how-waterfront-t...

Did they read too much Snow Crash?

Literally came here about to post an excerpt from the first chapter. Anyway, yeah like how do you wind up this cartoonishly orwellian?

Sidewalk’s stated goal with data collection in this project is (roughly) to learn, run experiments, and figure out how to really run a city.

But couldn’t they have done without some of the extreme bits here in the tiniest acknowledgement that maybe there’s a reason people like some amount of privacy and that maybe a sudden conversion to all-private-everything isn’t as good an experiment as they think?

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