The biggest opponents of Sidewalk Labs' proposed "smart" neighborhood in Toronto fear the Alphabet project will turn into one big "scam."
What if Big Tech planned a city from scratch?
That’s the idea behind Quayside, a 12-acre plot of land on Toronto’s eastern harbor. Earlier this month I visited the mostly vacant swatch of waterfront property where Sidewalk Labs, Alphabet’s urban tech subsidiary, is designing what it hopes will be a data-driven, eco-friendly wonderland. Opponents, however, see the project as a disaster in the making.
I covered the protracted battle over this mud lot in an article from the March issue of the magazine, alongside a collection of other city-themed stories. (Adam discussed his excellent deep dive on San Francisco’s troubles in yesterday’s Data Sheet.)
During a tour of the Quayside site, I was wowed by Sidewalk’s ambition. The Google sibling has devised what it hopes will be a safe, affordable, and efficient neighborhood. The team uses all the right buzzwords: combating climate change, prioritizing pedestrians and low-income populations, optimizing resource use, and making life “infinitely better,” as Sidewalk CEO Dan Doctoroff put it to me.
But since Sidewalk won the right to propose its vision for the area in 2017, the development has been hamstrung by criticism. A #BlockSidewalk movement comprised of Toronto locals sprung up to counter the project. Activists fear the data privacy implications of the deal, and they accuse the corporation of intruding like an old-school colonialist. Quayside’s owner, a nonprofit economic development group called Waterfront Toronto, has dithered and delayed its final decision-making. The group now says it will decide whether to proceed with Sidewalk’s plans by May 20 (a deadline that has already been twice extended).
I met up with Bianca Wylie, a founder of the opposition movement as well as the activist group Tech Reset Canada, at a hotel bar. I asked Wylie to describe her most dystopian vision of the outcome. To my surprise, Wylie did not invoke Minority Report, Big Brother, or the kinds of mass surveillance-enabled clampdowns on civil rights seen in regions of China. Instead, Wylie said her biggest fear was that the whole debacle would turn out to be one big “scam.”
In Wylie’s view, data privacy is a bit of a red herring. Alphabet and many other tech giants love talking about the topic because they’ve prepared canned responses about privacy’s value, efforts to minimize data collection, and putting opt-ins and other protections in place. What’s really at issue, Wylie says, is that a government may sell out its citizens to a corporation. To Wylie, Toronto is ceding the mandates of public institutions to private industry.
It’s easy to get carried away by the paradise Sidewalk renders. Indeed, everyone I spoke to—including Quayside’s critics—seems to think that Alphabet’s experiment is going to pass muster. (Even if the implementation details remain in flux.)
But the critics are not quieting down. As one of the project’s biggest opponents, Jim Balsillie, the former co-CEO of BlackBerry maker Research in Motion, told me: “Whatever is going to happen, it’s going to be a defanged and mangled mess.”
Robert Hackett
Twitter: @rhhackett
Email: robert.hackett@fortune.com
