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'City of surveillance': privacy expert quits Toronto's smart-city project

Wired neighborhood planned by Google sister company has raised questions over data protection


Gabrielle Canon
@GabrielleCanon

Tue 23 Oct 2018 17.36 EDT First published on Tue 23 Oct 2018 16.40 EDT

 

Google’s sister company Sidewalk Labs has promised a ‘thriving hub for innovation’. Photograph: Roberto Machado Noa/LightRocket via Getty Images

When it was announced last year that a district in Toronto would be handed over to a company hoping to build a model for new tech-driven smart city, critics were quick to voice concerns.

Despite Justin Trudeau’s exclamation that, through a partnership with Google’s sister company Sidewalk Labs, the waterfront neighborhood could help turn the area into a “thriving hub for innovation”, questions immediately arose over how the new wired town would collect and protect data.

A year into the project, those questions have resurfaced following the resignation of a privacy expert, Dr Ann Cavoukian, who claimed she left her consulting role on the initiative to “send a strong statement” about the data privacy issues the project still faces.

“I imagined us creating a Smart City of Privacy, as opposed to a Smart City of Surveillance,” she wrote in her resignation letter.

After initially being told that the data collected would be wiped and unidentifiable, Cavoukian told reporters she learned during a meeting last week that third parties could access identifiable information gathered in the district.

“When I heard that, I said: ‘I’m sorry. I can’t support this,’” she told the Global News. “I have to resign because you committed to embedding privacy by design into every aspect of your operation.”