We’ve been closely following the plan by Google sister company Sidewalk Labs to build a surveilling “smart city” in Toronto; last week, I sat down with the Out of Left Field podcast (MP3) to discuss what’s going on with Sidewalk Labs, how it fits into the story of Big Tech, and what the alternatives might be.
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Toronto approves Google’s surveillance city, despite leaks revealing Orwellian plans
Yesterday, Waterfront Toronto unanimously approved the continuation of Sidewalk Labs’s plans for “Quayside,” a privatised, surveillance-oriented “smart city” that has been mired in controversy since its earliest days, including secret bullying campaigns, mass resignations of privacy advisors, lies that drastically understated the scope of the project, civil liberties lawsuits, and denunciations by the indigenous elders who were consulted on the project.
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Indigenous elder on Sidewalk Labs’s Toronto consultation: “like being given blankets and gun powder and whisky to trade for our participation”
Sidewalk Labs (previously) is a “smart city” company that was spun out of Google, though it remains owned by Alphabet, Google’s parent company; Sidewalk Labs’s first major outing is a planned “experimental city” on Toronto’s lakeshore, and it’s been a disaster, from the bullying it used to get the project’s initial approval to being outed for sneaking a massive expansion into the agreement and then lying about it, to mass resignations by its privacy advisors, who denounced the project as a corporate surveillance city whose “privacy protections” were mere figleafs for unfettered, nonconsensual collection and exploitation of residents’ data.
Griefer terrorizes baby by taking over their Nest babycam…again
Nest is a home automation company that Google bought in 2014, turned into an independent unit of Alphabet, then re-merged with Google again in 2018 (demonstrating that the “whole independent companies under Alphabet” thing was just a flag of convenience for tax purposes); the company has always focused on “ease of use” over security and internecine warfare between different dukes and lords of Google meant that it was never properly integrated with Google’s security team, which is why, over and over again, people who own Nest cameras discover strangers staring at them from their unblinking camera eyes, sometimes shouting obscenities.
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Critical essays (including mine) discuss Toronto’s plan to let Google build a surveillance-based “smart city” along its waterfront
Sidewalk Labs is Google’s sister company that sells “smart city” technology; its showcase partner is Toronto, my hometown, where it has made a creepy shitshow out of its freshman outing, from the mass resignations of its privacy advisors to the underhanded way it snuck in the right to take over most of the lakeshore without further consultations (something the company straight up lied about after they were outed). Unsurprisingly, the city, the province, the country, and the company are all being sued over the plan.
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Training bias in AI “hate speech detector” means that tweets by Black people are far more likely to be censored
More bad news for Google’s beleaguered spinoff Jigsaw, whose flagship project is “Perspective,” a machine-learning system designed to catch and interdict harassment, hate-speech and other undesirable online speech.
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Like Amazon, Google sends voice assistant recordings to contractors for transcription, including recordings made inadvertently
After Bloomberg revealed that Amazon secretly sent recordings from Alexa to subcontractors all over the world in order to improve its speech-recognition systems, a whistleblower leaked recordings from Google Home to investigative reporters from VRT, revealing that Google, too, was sending audio clips from its voice assistant technology to pieceworkers through the Crowdsource app.
Insiders claim that Google’s internet-fixing Jigsaw is a toxic vanity project for its founder, where women keep a secret post-crying touchup kit in the bathroom
In 2016, Google announced that it was renaming its small Google Ideas unit to “Jigsaw,” giving the new unit a much broader, “wildly ambitious” mandate: to tackle “surveillance, extremist indoctrination, and censorship.”
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Rumor: DoJ is going to investigate Google for antitrust violations
According to a widely reported rumor — first published by the WSJ — the DoJ is preparing to launch an antitrust probe of Google, though it’s not clear on what basis such a probe would proceed.
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Canadian Civil Liberties Association sues Toronto, Ontario, and Canada over the plan for a Google Sidewalk Labs “smart city” in Toronto
Sidewalk Labs is the division of Alphabet/Google that builds “smart city” technology; their most ambitious project to date is a massive privatised city-within-a-city planned for Toronto’s lakeshore — a project that received secretly approval to be much larger than was announced, a fact that Sidewalk lied about.
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