<story><title>Opposition to Sidewalk Labs in Toronto</title><url>https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-47815344</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>60654</author><text>The opposition to this is not just from the privacy perspective, there&amp;#x27;s also the issue of data ownership, and giving all this data away to Google for free. And once it&amp;#x27;s owned, both cities and citizens lose all control and oversight - you can&amp;#x27;t get yourself removed from the dataset, impose restrictions on how this personal data will be used, etc.&lt;p&gt;There are some good quotes in this older Reuters story (&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.reuters.com&amp;#x2F;article&amp;#x2F;us-canada-cities-privacy-feature&amp;#x2F;green-paradise-or-data-stealing-dystopia-toronto-smart-city-sparks-debate-idUSKBN1QS25E&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.reuters.com&amp;#x2F;article&amp;#x2F;us-canada-cities-privacy-fea...&lt;/a&gt;):&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; 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).”&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; “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.”&lt;p&gt;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. :)</text></comment>
<story><title>Opposition to Sidewalk Labs in Toronto</title><url>https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-47815344</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>ilaksh</author><text>To me the most of the ways that I can think of a city being smart are not related to surveillance.&lt;p&gt;If there is some system that is supposed to benefit the public then its designs should be public and subject to public approval.&lt;p&gt;What would be reasonable would be something like open source designs and protocols and maybe an electronic bidding system for projects.&lt;p&gt;But it sounds like its one company embedding whatever spy-tech they want and controlling everything over a large area behind closed doors.&lt;p&gt;I actually am really looking forward to smart cities.  But smart as in high tech and advanced, not smart as in monopolistic surveillance dystopia.</text></comment>