Archive: Google’s smart city a privacy nightmare

You're doing distopia all wrong

 

Engadget reported on a "smart city" experimental neighborhood planned for Quayside, a portion of the waterfront in Toronto, Canada. The headline read, "Google’s smart city dream is turning into a privacy nightmare." See  https://www.engadget.com/2018/10/26/sidewalk-labs-ann-cavoukian-smart-city/. More accurately, it is Google's parent, Alphabet, doing the work through its Sidewalk Labs division, which is engaged in  smart city work.

The story was sparked by a member of the planning team, who resigned after she objected to a Data Trust being given the trust to "approve data collection that isn't anonymized or de-identified at the source." In short, Google wants Quayside to be like your Android phone, where it wishes to track everything you do, say, and view.

Returning to the headline...

But, no. It's not turning into a privacy nightmare: it always was meant to be a nightmare. The no-privacy bug is designed into smart cities, right from the beginning, but it is worded as a "feature" -- or, more accurately, the 'smart city' feature. It it's smart, it can't be a bug. Why do you suppose dictatorships like Singapore and China are keen on smart cities? It sure isn't for the green aspect. 

Smart cities is the side-effect of the envy of Google feels in seeing Facebook collecting non-anonymized data. That, and the techno-utopianism that bets billions that technology turns otherwise flawed humans into perfection -- the singularity, followed by the utopia.

And so, how can we be sure that utopia will persist if we cannot track every citizen's action, by name, to ensure he retains the Good Citizen Achievement Level. If we detect a citizen failing be an Eloi, then we are prepared to ban him to a Morlock existence.

 

Comments

[Bill Fane]

I find it interesting that people will scream bloody murder if they think that government is invading their privacy, but have no problem with posting intimate details about their lives on public social media.
I fear Google more than I fear government.