Comment by lostgame | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lostgame | Hacker News Reader

‘I’ve met thousands of Torontonians from all over the city, excited by the possibility of making urban life better for everyone.’

This is simply not true, in my experience as a Torontonian. The overall opinion of this project was incredibly low, from at least dozens of people it’s come up with - at work, at events, with friends - if anything, there’ll be a lot of people happy to hear this. There were even questions as to why our tax dollars would even support this when we’ve got issues like homelessness, etc. As Forbes said, it was ‘tech for tech’s sake’.

Forbes: ‘In June of 2019, Sidewalk’s master plan was released, eliciting a barrage of controversy around privacy and participation.

The Canadian Civil Liberties Association initiated a lawsuit against local, provincial and federal government over data privacy concerns. Vice called the proposal a “democracy grenade“.‘

https://www.forbes.com/sites/ellistalton/2019/09/26/why-side...

Edit: I’m shocked at the number of downvotes for similar comments - I guess backing up your points counts. If you don’t think this closure is good for Toronto, especially if you live here, I’d like to know why.

Couldn't agree more as a Torontonian. It didn't help that they conducted most of the discussions in bad faith with the whole "trust us with your data" approach when these were geniune concerns due to the amount of oversight and control they were provided.

I agree that this was a train wreck in slow motion. What is sad is I didn't see any significant open engagement with GTA's existing tech scene (did hear a lot of talk of it though). Maybe the VCs club had access but as a technologist, I certainly didn't. If this was happening in SF, there would be grass roots meetups all over the place, and a more serious focus on action rather than planning.

They did a series of town halls, funded a bunch of urban / tech meetups. Pretty proactive for a period. The townhalls were very... SF style, it didn't mesh with the local culture well. But I don't think they did a lot of work either, there's a pretty lackluster showroom and they put out some very middling concept sketches - not proper renders like you see in most smart city projects. Didn't seem like they were taking things seriously. A lot of words. Maybe too many. At least not enough right ones.

I'm a Torontonian and I was looking forward to the project. I'm sad to see it cancelled. (It's a big city with many opinions, I don't think you can fairly claim that quote about "thousands of Torontonians" is "simply not true" from a sample size of dozens, the author is not even claiming all those people supported the Quayside project specifically).

Sure, some parts of the project looked like tech for tech's sake but I was excited about the urban design plans and architecture. And who knows, maybe some of the tech-y things would turn out to be good too. That's what experiments are for, and this wasn't a very large scale or risky one when compared to the size of the city so it's worth it to me to try new things even if many of the ideas don't work out. As for data issues, it seemed like the city and Waterfront Toronto were not afraid to exercise a lot of control on that front so Sidewalk Labs wasn't going to be able to do whatever they wanted, a lot of effort was going into ensuring it was in the public interest. This latest news supports the idea that the city was uncompromising in supporting what they see as the public interest - even to the extent that Sidewalk labs gives up entirely.

I think lots of people were interested in the idea of such a project.

I don't know anyone with real experience in development, city planning, etc. who took it seriously though as anything other than a source of a few ideas. None of them thought google had the skills, experience, or even commitment to do the project - probably correctly.

> As Forbes said, it was ‘tech for tech’s sake’.

It was more than that.

A sizable number of people carry Android-based surveillance, or data collection, devices in their pockets.

Imagine the upside for Google if people lived and worked inside Google devices.

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