Waterfront Toronto: Privacy or Piracy?

Toronto's Portlands neighborhood is the target of an enormous redevelopment effort that will infuse smart-city technologies into the urban morphology. The quasi-governmental Waterfront Toronto agency has partnered with the Alphabet subsidiary company Sidewalk Labs to plan and build out the neighborhood, essentially from the ground up, and embedded it with sophisticated technologies. The redevelopment plan details a digital layer made up of sensors that will collect and process locational information, tracking movement and usage patterns. Yet the project has been mired in controversy, mainly because of questions about data ownership and management. While there will be the amassing of an unfathomable amount of data, it is not clear who will control it and how it will be processed and used. Critics of the project have pointed out that the potential value of the data is enormous and if a private company has exclusive domain over it, that company could decide to sell it at will. Securely storing citizen’s data is another problem. This paper provides a description of the popular newspaper accounts of the Waterfront Toronto Project. It discusses how the project and redevelopment authority came to be, how Alphabet be-came the primary partner, the redevelopment vision, and controversy that has engulfed this smart-city project.