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In the past few months, Sidewalk Labs seems to be downplaying [the “Big Brother”-esque surveillance] aspect of the development. For example, nary a mention of the word “data” was heard in this presentation in August. That’s a problem, according to critics. Nearly 11 months into the company’s original, one-year consultation agreement, Sidewalk Labs has provided little information during the public engagement process about how data gathered at Quayside would be owned and used. That has advocates, researchers, and other involved in the project worried about exactly what the tech company wants with Toronto, and who gets left with the bill.   

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That somewhat Orwellian vision of city management had privacy advocates and academics concerned from the the start. Bianca Wylie, the co-founder of the technology advocacy group Tech Reset Canada, has been perhaps the most outspoken of the project’s local critics. For the last year, she’s spoken up at public fora, written pointed op-eds and Medium posts, and warned city officials of what she sees as the “Trojan horse” of smart city marketing: private companies that stride into town promising better urban governance, but are really there to sell software and monetize citizen data.

“Smart cities are largely an invention of the private sector—an effort to create a market within government,” Wylie wrote in Canada’s Globe and Mail newspaper in December 2017. “The business opportunities are clear. The risks inherent to residents, less so.” A month later, at a Toronto City Council meeting, Wylie gave a deputation asking officials to “ensure that the data and data infrastructure of this project are the property of the city of Toronto and its residents.”

In this case, the unwary Trojans would be Waterfront Toronto, the nonprofit corporation appointed by three levels of Canadian government to own, manage, and build on the Port Lands, 800 largely undeveloped acres between downtown and Lake Ontario. 

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Adding to public anxiety is the fact that the first planned draft agreement between Waterfront Toronto and Sidewalk Labs—the initial document outlining the terms of the relationship, as they work towards a development plan—wasn’t made public until after nine months of public pressure. A second draft of that document was released at the end of July, which assigned more power to Waterfront Toronto and further restricted the conditions of its relationship to Sidewalk Labs than the original. But it, too, barely grazed the question of who owns what data and how it could be monetized. (Waterfront Toronto did not respond to CityLab’s requests for comment.)