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Google's Smart City Dream Is Turning Into a Privacy Nightmare (engadget.com)
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.
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.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
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 built around doing that. It is easily within Google's abilities.
The ONLY safe thing is to have no data collected.
"... turning Into a Privacy Nightmare..."
Really now? When was it anything else?