Ann Cavoukian, Ontario’s former Privacy Commissioner stepped down from her role as a consultant at Google’s sister company Sidewalk Labs, last Friday.
Sidewalk Labs has collaborated with Waterfront TO, an organization responsible for revitalization projects along the Toronto waterfront in Canada. The collaboration includes developing a 12-acre hi-tech neighborhood, called Quayside, on the shore of Lake Ontario.
Cavoukian is not the only one. Saadia Muzaffar, tech entrepreneur, and founder of TechGirls Canada, also stepped down, earlier this month, from her advisory role, over “profound concerns” about the Quayside project. She also mentioned how Waterfront Toronto showed “apathy and a lack of leadership regarding shaky public trust”.
This project comprises implementing internet-connected devices such as pedestrian counters, and air-quality sensors among others to track energy consumption, noise, traffic, and pollution. This project, however, has sparked debate and criticism over the concern that people’s privacy is getting compromised as the company collects all their data via sensors. Sidewalk Labs came out with a digital governance framework last week to “set a new model for responsible data use in cities — anchored by an independent Civic Data Trust”.
Cavoukian’s decision to resign from the project seems to be the result of this recent digital governance framework. As per the proposal, Sidewalk Labs would be committed to “de-identifying” (wiping of the personal info) the data but it is in no power to control what the third-parties do with that data. This is different from what Cavoukian was advocating (Privacy by Design) and did not approve of it.
“Sidewalk Labs has committed to implement, as a company, the principles of Privacy by Design. Though that question is settled, the question of whether other companies involved in the Quayside project would be required to do so is unlikely to be worked out soon and may be out of Sidewalk Labs’ hands,” Sidewalk spokesman, Dan Levitan mentioned in an e-mailed statement as reported by the Globe and Mail.
As per Cavoukian’s privacy by design principles (considered a global standard), it embeds the “privacy measures into the design of a project, asking questions such as: “What is the minimum data you really need to accomplish the goal?” and “Do you need personal information, or can you accomplish it with de-identified data?”. The main feature of this framework is that on collecting personal information via surveillance cameras and sensors, all kinds of personally identifying information (PII) gets anonymized automatically at the source.
Although the proposal states that “No one should own urban data — it should be made freely and publicly available“, it’s not quite immediately clear who would be leading the governance body to handle all the data.
“Just think of the consequences: If personally identifiable data are not de-identified at source, we will be creating another central database of personal information (controlled by whom?), that may be used without data subjects’ consent, that will be exposed to the risks of hacking and unauthorized access,” wrote Cavoukian in her resignation letter as reported by the Globe and Mail. Cavoukian mentioned that she would return back to the project only if Waterfront Toronto confirms that all the parties involved in the project wanting to use the public data would de-identify the personal data at its source.
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