Google dumps imagine tech city where smart streets melt snow, sensors steer traffic
Google said Thursday it really is abandoning its smart-city development in Toronto and blamed unprecedented monetary uncertainty.
A unit of Google’s parent company Alphabet have been proposing to carefully turn a rundown part of Toronto’s waterfront into a wired community, but Sidewalk Labs chief executive Dan Doctoroff said in a statement that it's no more financially viable.
“As unprecedented economical uncertainty has occur all over the world and in the Toronto market, it is becoming too difficult to make the project financially viable without sacrificing core parts of the plan,” Doctoroff said.
Sidewalk Labs had partnered with a government agency known as Waterfront Toronto with plans to erect mid-rise apartments, offices, shops and a school on a 12-acre (4.9-hectare) site _ an initial step toward what it hoped would eventually be considered a 800-acre (325-hectare) development.
Heated streets could have melted ice and snow on contact. Sensors would have monitored traffic and protected pedestrians, and driver-less shuttles could have carried people with their doors.
But some Canadians balked at the privacy implications of giving probably the most data-hungry companies on the planet the methods to wire up from street lights to pavement. Changes were since designed to make it more palatable however, many celebrated Google’s decision to scrap it.
“This is a significant victory for the responsible citizens who fought to safeguard Canada’s democracy, civil and digital rights, and also the economic development opportunity,” said former BlackBerry leader Jim Balsillie, a smartphone pioneer. “Sidewalk Toronto will decrease in history as one of the more disturbing planned experiments in surveillance capitalism.”
Doctoroff had said the company was not seeking to monetize people’s personal information in the manner that Google does now with search information. He had said the program was to invent so-far-undefined products and services that Sidewalk Labs could market elsewhere.
Concerns in Canada intensified following a series of privacy scandals at Facebook and Google.
