Comment by 60654 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by 60654 | Hacker News Reader

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The opposition to this is not just from the privacy perspective, there's also the issue of data ownership, and giving all this data away to Google for free. And once it's owned, both cities and citizens lose all control and oversight - you can't get yourself removed from the dataset, impose restrictions on how this personal data will be used, etc.

There are some good quotes in this older Reuters story (https://www.reuters.com/article/us-canada-cities-privacy-fea...):

> The proposal amounts to “permanent surveillance” and “massive data scraping” under the guise of fighting climate change, he said. “They are conducting an experiment in real time, in the real world: the privatization of our cities on a large scale. They will have intellectual property rights over all of this (data).”

> “We live in a system that values property rights,” Orasch told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. “In that system, data is a valuable asset for an individual to have.”

And the developer asking for investment money and a cut of property taxes, on top of gathering all this private data and owning it forever without oversight, is just icing on the cake. :)

This article has poor fact-checking. For example, the quote by the Queen's University professor is not accurate (or, charitably, outdated as of the time of publishing).

>The proposal amounts to “permanent surveillance” and “massive data scraping” under the guise of fighting climate change, he said.

>“They are conducting an experiment in real time, in the real world: the privatization of our cities on a large scale. They will have intellectual property rights over all of this (data).”

In October 2018 Sidewalk proposed a third party "Civic Data Trust" that would own and maintain the data. Its blog post on the subject reiterates repeatedly that the data cannot and should not be owned by Sidewalk:

>No one has a right to own information collected from Quayside’s physical environment — including Sidewalk Labs. Instead, this “urban data” should be under the control of an independent Civic Data Trust.

>No one should own urban data — it should be made freely and publicly available.

>We believe all data needs protection, but the extent to which urban data specifically may be collected in Quayside is what’s new and different here. Existing laws on urban data do not address ownership. And urban data is only regulated when it contains personally identifiable information. Even then, these rules are often not followed in the public realm. We seek to build on them.

https://www.sidewalklabs.com/blog/an-update-on-data-governan...

Didn't they already break this promise when they absorbed NHS data from deepmind back into Google, only two years after suggesting that Google would never obtain them?

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/nov/14/google-be...

In other words, do we have any assurances that these third parties can't be restructured with a sleight-of-hand?

Presumably, if the Civic Data Trust proposal was more than a shell game, Sidewalk Lab’s privacy chief wouldn’t have said they were building a surveillance system in the resignation letter.

I don't see how a civic data trust is mutually exclusive with a surveillance state — it just provides common ownership and open access to the surveillance data. It seems Cavoukian's dispute centered on the lack of a requirement for third-party (non-Alphabet) data providers to anonymize data at the source.

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