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Comment by etimberg | Hacker News Reader

As someone who lives in Toronto, the collapse of this project is a great outcome. While the goals of the project seem forward thinking and could benefit society in the long run (in terms of renewable building, etc) Google is 110% the wrong company to be involved.

Imagine you lived there and your google account gets banned by some overzealous ML model. Do you just get locked out of your house?

If Google, or any other company, wants to make this kind of development, they should be regulated as a public utility and be accountable as such

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My big problem from the beginning was that the money flow made no sense. Why should Toronto be paying for a Google experiment? Google benefitted far more than any other party involved, and that felt slimy.

Did money flow from the city to Alphabet? My understanding was that it was hugely in the opposite direction, with sidewalk investing alphabet money into the project.

right because with Google, the customer is the product.

The customer (and their data) is the raw material from which products are created. E.g. an advert targeting product.

Google bought 12 acres of waterfront property and was working on development. Aside from the usual level of involvement (meetings, permitting, etc) the city had no skin in the game.

They bought the land at a heavy discount, continued to stretch their proposal far beyond the scope of the original RFP, demanded further city investment into transit/land development in order to facilitate their idea, and proposed low-income housing that was frankly a crap deal. In the end Google would've been reaping all the profits of the development deal while the city pays to clean up the mess.

It basically boiled down to somewhere between a mediocre and a pretty bad deal for the local economy, instead of letting a local developer do their thing. I wouldn't have been surprised if it ended up costing (especially if you add in the land discount and subsidies) taxpayers well over a billion dollars. The whole thing reeked of a PR stunt for the Gov working with Big Tech, but I don't know of a single citizen who thought it was a good idea.

Next time, follow a fair RFP process. I'd rather have Amazon try and develop the waterfront.

The only difference here is that is has Google's name on it instead of AvalonBay, Greystar, Hines, Simon, Westfield, ProLogis, etc.

People have an opinion about Google, but they have never heard of any of the other companies that would have done the exact same thing, just with shittier neighborhood wifi.

They all get discounted land from the city, modify the original RFP scope to fit their vision, push the city to create an attractive level of services, drop in a token number of low income houses, and flip the houses for a profit.

I am acutely aware of active REITs/development firms in Toronto, and I have a lot more respect for their process than for what Sidewalk did.

We don't need neighborhood WiFi -- Fiber is widely available within the city and it's a lot cheaper than what I saw in the US.

Due to COVID-19, there has been far more innovation in the city, mostly top-down from the government, than what we saw with Sidewalk. Who cares if they can reconfigure the street? Let people ride their bikes, build community spaces, etc.

Sidewalk garnered negative public opinion because they tried to overreach what people are comfortable with from a real estate developer. Look at what Amazon did in Seattle over the last decade, and maybe take a page out of their book, instead of hand-waving about self-driving cars you're dreaming of sprinkling around the neighbourhood.

This is like complaining that the city sold a chunk of land to a theme park and you didn't like any of the rides they put in.

For the most part the experiment was confined to the land they legally purchased. At no point did they represent the project as anything other than an experiment. If the land was sold below market, you should have spoken up at the time about that.

That would be a fair assessment, but did you miss the part where Google got a discount based on an agreement, then changed the agreement and started demanding additional concessions?

It is perfectly fair for the people of Toronto to push back and re-evaluate the value proposition of the deal if the other party is attempting to renegotiate.

I think Toronto should deffinitely pay for new more efficiently built housing. In my opinion it's better to let Google benefit than random offshore entities that are hoarding the majority of the empty new apartments in the city.

Also, this was housing for meant their employees, most of which will have high salaries and be in high tax brackets.

So not only did we loose a few thousand housing units, now we also lost a few thousand future employees each of which would be paying $20 - 40 000 CAD in taxes to us every single year.

That is terrible.

Yep, I've been saying for ages that the big companies need to have their banning policies be public overseen and accountable if they plan on having any significant impact on our lives in this way.

The last public number was that Twitter was banning 10 fake bots per second. How exactly do you plan to have a public oversight process for fighting fraud and abuse at scale?

Well if those bots are able to login and prove they're real people, it wouldn't be a problem. I suspect, though, with bots, they'll just create new accounts and not even bother with any sort of appeals process.

Imagine you lived there and your google account gets banned by some overzealous ML model. Do you just get locked out of your house?

No.

Since Google hates passwords, I can't imagine that they would support plain old metal keys for doors. Neither can I imagine how unlocking a Google door wouldn't involve an arbitrarily closable Google account. Other incidents have shown that once your Google account is closed, Google won't talk to you.

"Google must operate based on the stereotype I have of them in my head"

As the relationship advice goes "when someone shows you who they are believe them." Plenty documented examples of Googling acting in the stated way across various products. No reason to assume they won't act the same in this case sooner or latter.

What evidence is there that "google hates passwords"? That's literally the only way to log into a google account.

https://www.trustedreviews.com/news/google-fingerprint-chrom...

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/may/24/google-pa...

A fingerprint is essentially a password printed on your fingertip. And the second link is more about determining whether someone is who they say they are beyond passwords provided.

For existing Google-branded locks, typing a passcode into the device still works https://support.google.com/googlenest/answer/9233966?co=GENI... It looks like you can change your passcode by doing a factory reset of the lock.

It can be shockingly difficult to get Google to talk to you while you have an account too. Unless you are a paying Google customer, it is challenging to get support.

That's a broad claim - please substantiate.

That's a broad claim - please substantiate.

No.

As someone who lives in Toronto, I'm disappointed we couldn't even have this as an experiment with smart city technologies. "It's time to build" and all that.

Agreed that it is unfortunate we could not have this experiment, but perhaps Waterfront Toronto can go back to the drawing board and do the experiment with local companies and homegrown technology.

I would doubt that any company would take such a bet now. If not Google, then why would, say, Shopify stand a better chance? I'm an entrepreneur from Toronto and I won't bet the next three years on my life on a municipal government that has shown a bias against action again and again.

Not even sure that data privacy killed this project. It was probably the bias against action that plagues every branch of government nowadays.

Indeed, quite sad. This risk aversion, or maybe inability to weigh benefits against costs, is the stagnation Thiel is always talking about.

I disagree with that, i think the various mix of cheap insecure IP-cameras present on any small store and elsewhere poses a far greater privacy risk than a well managed and frequently audited system one would expect from google.

The cheap security cameras are relatively trivial to gain access too at scale and you can run facial recognitioning on their video with zero accountability.

At least with google and facebook you get a non-zero level of accountability.You can still summon their CEO in front of the public somewhere for questioning.

Or if you're an EU citizen you can demand you data be wiped off.

You can't practically do that with an insecure patchwork of security cameras. This is why I think the privacy concerns for this project were quite misguided.

In my opinion it's better to go with a single choice of where security video with identifiable faces is going instead of having no clue who's tracking you. I'm not personally happy that that choice is Google given their screwup with nest and with 3rd-party dev access to gmail, however I think the practical outcome is a lot worse when not choosing anything at all.

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