Google's Smart City Dream Is Turning Into a Privacy Nightmare (engadget.com) 61
schwit1 shares a report from Engadget: Sidewalk Labs, an Alphabet division focused on smart cities, is caught in a battle over information privacy. The team has lost its lead expert and consultant, Ann Cavoukian, over a proposed data trust that would approve and manage the collection of information inside Quayside, a conceptual smart neighborhood in Toronto. Cavoukian, the former information and privacy commissioner for Ontario, disagrees with the current plan because it would give the trust power to approve data collection that isn't anonymized or "de-identified" at the source. "I had a really hard time with that," she told Engadget. "I just couldn't... I couldn't live with that."
Cavoukian isn't the first privacy expert to abandon the Quayside project. Saadia Muzaffar, founder of TechGirls Canada, left the Digital Strategy Advisory Panel earlier this month. In a resignation letter, she said Waterfront Toronto had shown "apathy and [an] utter lack of leadership regarding shaky public trust and social license." The advisory panel was attended "in good faith," she said, but showed "a blatant disregard for resident concerns about data." These disagreements will add to the concerns of Torontonians. Sidewalk Labs still has time to address these issues and create a master plan that will be accepted by everyone. If the company continues to lose public trust, though, there's a good chance residents and government officials will make up their minds and reject the plan before reading the first page.
Cavoukian isn't the first privacy expert to abandon the Quayside project. Saadia Muzaffar, founder of TechGirls Canada, left the Digital Strategy Advisory Panel earlier this month. In a resignation letter, she said Waterfront Toronto had shown "apathy and [an] utter lack of leadership regarding shaky public trust and social license." The advisory panel was attended "in good faith," she said, but showed "a blatant disregard for resident concerns about data." These disagreements will add to the concerns of Torontonians. Sidewalk Labs still has time to address these issues and create a master plan that will be accepted by everyone. If the company continues to lose public trust, though, there's a good chance residents and government officials will make up their minds and reject the plan before reading the first page.
And we can only hope they drop it (Score:2, Funny)
There is nothing a "privacy policy" can do to stop data from being collected.
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Good luck finding one that isn't in bed with TLAs and/or said ad companies.
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Google handles large scale network technology, and small scale for their internal services and personnel, constantly and effectively. I'd expect them to have considerable expertise. Their _goals_ will differ from those of a typical ISP.
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no.. laws let the state selectively come down hard on the hands of political enemies (or littlepeople) they find in the cookie jar. Their friends will be exempt.
Re: And we can only hope they drop it (Score:1)
Well, privacy laws that say you shall not collect data would help because the only secure data is that which nobody possesses. Funny how privacy laws never seem to work like that.
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And "anonymization", isn't... not when the adversary has as much data as Google does about every person living in a first world country. It can re-associate identities with anonymized datasets.
There are entire industries [techdirt.com]built around doing that. It is easily within Google's abilities.
The ONLY safe thing is to have no data collected.
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And we should view their approach to "privacy policy" the same way the average person views the EULA.
They don't read it, it doesn't apply, and they don't care.
Everything else follows from that.
An ad company (Score:3)
of course it is (Score:5, Insightful)
The only real chance for privacy is if the systems are self-contained on the property and data isn't exfiltrated to offsite servers. Even then, there are security risks if the system has bugs that make it vulnerable.
Given that Google's business is user data, there's no practical way to have privacy in a Google-driven home.
I expect similar problems for Google self-driving cars unless laws mandate that voice tech and general listening has to be handled in-car, and even then there are issues.
Re:of course it is (Score:4)
I do not understand what kind of gullible moron would think, even for a second, there wouldn't be serious privacy implications stemming from the arguably largest data collection company being the de-facto owner of the project. It's mind-blowing Toronto people would fall for this.
Re:of course it is (Score:4, Insightful)
It's mind-blowing Toronto people would fall for this.
They're not.
From the summary:
" The advisory panel was attended "in good faith," she said, but showed "a blatant disregard for resident concerns about data."
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Re: of course it is (Score:1)
Nonsense. They don't need a firewall as long as they have APKs hosts file engine.
Governments will acquiesce to corporations (Score:4, Interesting)
If the company continues to lose public trust, though, there's a good chance residents and government officials will make up their minds and reject the plan before reading the first page.
I'm not sure where the author gets this conclusion, re: "good chance...governments officials will... reject the plan..." Governments and politicians will side with corporations over residents when they smell the money and hear the big promises of more money. Privacy is not something most governments care about.
The government doesn't give a rats ass (Score:2)
Re: The government doesn't give a rats ass (Score:2)
I can count ZERO government agencies whom use encrypted mail, support digital encrypted signatures
Guess you never heard of the military.
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I love the apologists (Score:1)
Look, simply because a company collects data without regard for its safety or privacy of its subjects doesn't mean its ok. And just because it's happened the past or continues to doesn't make it acceptable. Google has the technology and the means to collect data in a responsible way and demonstrate that they are good stewards of it. But they don't seem to be doing this. Instead we have people coming out of the woodwork to apologize for their behavior. No, it's not OK. Google has to do better and demonstrate
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>it's not OK
>has to do better
>try a little harder
Damn, with that level of public anger working against them they're fucked.
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Google's Dystopian EPCOT is DOA (hopefully) (Score:2)
Congratulations, Google...
You've successfully "Don't Be Evil"-ed enough so that no one in their right mind would possibly agree to live there unless they wanted to become an Alphabet serf.
Disney at its most malicious would be 1000x more trustworthy than Alphabet in this regard, and I'd sooner live the rest of my days in the RCID [wikipedia.org] than step foot in Googleville.
Largely, Canadians don't care much (Score:1, Troll)
Re: Largely, Canadians don't care much (Score:1)
But see, that's misleading too. If you're WEALTHY, life is easy. The "white male" canard is nothing but antipopulist hate-politics.
Re: Largely, Canadians don't care much (Score:1)
Google *is* a privacy nightmare (Score:2)
Microsoft has official closed its acquisition of G (Score:2)