Sidewalk Labs Concepts

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism

by Shoshana Zuboff · 15 Jan 2019 · 918pp · 257,605 words

operational everywhere and detectable nowhere, always beyond the edge of individual awareness. In 2015, shortly after Google reorganized itself into a holding company called Alphabet, Sidewalk Labs became one of nine “confirmed companies” under the Alphabet corporate umbrella. Whether what even Sidewalk CEO Dan Doctoroff, a former private equity financier, CEO of

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, MacKay and Paradiso’s conceptions come to fruition under the auspices of surveillance capitalism in a grand scheme of vertically integrated supply, production, and sales. Sidewalk Labs’ first public undertaking was the installation of several hundred free internet-enabled kiosks in New York City, ostensibly to combat the problem of “digital inequality

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a lot of valuable information about people from a Wi-Fi network, even if they don’t use the kiosks.74 Doctoroff has characterized the Sidewalk Labs’ kiosks as “fountains of data” that will be equipped with environmental sensors and also collect “other data, all of which can create very hyperlocal information

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about conditions in the city.” In 2016 the US Department of Transportation (DOT) announced a partnership with Sidewalk Labs “to funnel transit data to city officials.” The DOT worked to draw cities into Google’s orbit with a competition for $40 million in grants

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. Winners would work with Sidewalk Labs to integrate technology into municipal operations, but Sidewalk Labs was eager to work with finalists in order to develop its own traffic-management system, Flow.75 Flow relies on Google Maps

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all existing transit and parking services.” Just as it requires public-transit data, Sidewalk also insists that cities share all parking and ridership information with Sidewalk Labs in real time.80 When asked, Doctoroff has emphasized the novel blending of public functions and private gain, assuring his listeners on both counts that

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a candid assessment of the “Google city” as a market operation shaped by the prediction imperative. He could not have been more direct in articulating Sidewalk Labs’ approach as a translation of Google’s online world to the reality of city life: In effect, what we’re doing is replicating the digital

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intent is to develop the right mix of technology that it can then license to cities around the world. “The genesis of the thinking for Sidewalk Labs came from Google’s founders getting excited thinking of ‘all the things you could do if someone would just give us a city and put

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parsing. In fact, the surveillance-based logic of online advertising had not disappeared. Rather, it had morphed into its physical-world mirror image, just as Sidewalk Labs’ Dan Doctoroff had imagined for the “Google city,” a precise extension of the methods and purposes honed in the online world but now amplified in

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Times, March 17, 2016, http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/18/technology/cities-to-untangle-traffic-snarls-with-help-from-alphabet-unit.html. 76. “Sidewalk Labs | Team—Alphabet,” Sidewalk Labs, October 2, 2017, https://www.sidewalklabs.com/team. 77. Dougherty, “Cities to Untangle.” 78. See Dougherty. 79. See Diana Budds, “How Google Is Turning

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to Fix Public Transit in US by Shifting Control to Google,” Guardian, June 27, 2016, http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jun/27/google-flow-sidewalk-labs-columbus-ohio-parking-transit. 81. Google City: How the Tech Juggernaut Is Reimagining Cities—Faster Than You Realize, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v

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into R&D Labs.” 85. Jessica E. Lessin, “Alphabet’s Sidewalk Preps Proposal for Digital District,” I nformation, April 14, 2016, https://www.theinformation.com/sidewalk-labs-preps-proposal-for-digital-district. 86. Eliot Brown, “Alphabet’s Next Big Thing: Building a ‘Smart’ City,” Wall Street Journal, April 27, 2016, http://www

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by, 189; Nest under umbrella of, 6, 237, 264; new city proposal of, 231–232; Niantic Labs under umbrella of, 150, 311; revenues of, 93; Sidewalk Labs under umbrella of, 228. See also Google; Schmidt, Eric Amazon: Alexa, 268–269; Dot speakers, 268; Echo, 261, 268, 269, 387; Lex, 268; turn toward

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, 301, 302–303 Fitbits, 387 fitness trackers, 249–250 five-factor personality model, 272, 273, 275, 276, 277–278, 285 Fleischer, Peter, 141–142 Flow (Sidewalk Labs/Google Traffic Management System), 228–231 FOMO (fear of missing out), 462–463 Food and Drug Administration, 248–249 Forbes, 169 Ford, Henry, 16–17

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–39, 41, 175, 181–182, 370, 499 shock and awe approach (speed as violence), 344, 346, 400, 406 Short, Jodi, 107–108 Shorten, Richard, 359 Sidewalk Labs, 228–232 signal blocking, 489 Silicon Valley, business environment in, 72–73 Simitis, Spiros, 191 Singularity University, 426 Siri (Apple digital assistant), 269 “A 61

The Long History of the Future: Why Tomorrow's Technology Still Isn't Here

by Nicole Kobie · 3 Jul 2024 · 348pp · 119,358 words

neighbourhood would look like if ever finished. We’ll all have to wait until 2030, and likely far beyond, to see what is eventually built. * * * Sidewalk Labs was quietly formed in 2015 to give Google co-founder Larry Page’s ‘urban innovation’ ideas – no one wants to call them ‘smart cities’ any

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term ‘smart cities’. The industry constantly changes what it means, and has realised it’s no longer a selling point – after all, even Google’s Sidewalk Labs said it practised ‘urban innovation’ – and city authorities seem all too aware of its waning ability to put a progressive sheen on mayors. And, with

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’s not going to happen, though you have to admit it has appeal. But we can take lessons from the past, from what has worked. Sidewalk Labs blamed the COVID-19 pandemic for making the Waterfront Toronto project unviable, but much of the credit should be handed to local activists such as

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origins of the smart city.’ Medium, January 15, 2021. https://biturl.top/q2UzMb Canadian Press. ‘The conscientious computer.’ Northern Sentinel, 30 April, 1969. Canadian Press. ‘Sidewalk Labs’ advisory panel member resigns citing “profound concern” about project.’ CBC News, October 5, 2018. https://biturl.top/FziUFb Casciato, Leonard and Cass, Sam. ‘Pilot Study

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Talk), December 16, 2021. https://biturl.top/J7JZR3 Doctoroff, Daniel L. ‘Why we’re no longer pursuing the Quayside project – and what’s next for Sidewalk Labs.’ Medium (Sidewalk Talk), May 7, 2020. https://biturl.top/FVNrue Dworkin, Larry. ‘Toronto’s computer traffic cop eases stop-light snarls.’ Star-Phoenix, 14 September

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Google Couldn’t Buy. Toronto, Canada, Random House Canada, 2022. ‘Signal computer aids Toronto’s traffic tie-ups.’ Ottawa Citizen, 19 August, 1964. Pearson, Jordan. ‘Sidewalk Labs’ 1,500-Page Plan for Toronto Is a Democracy Grenade.’ Vice, June 24, 2019. https://biturl.top/rYrAbq Pettit, Harry and White, Chris. ‘A glimpse

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Network (ARPANET) here, here Al Jaber, Sultan here Aldebaran Robotics here Alderson, Samuel W. here Alef Aeronautics here Allende, Salvador here Alphabet here, here, here Sidewalk Labs here, here see also Google Alphago algorithm, DeepMind here Altman, Sam here Amazon here, here, here American Institute Fair (1867) here American Research and Development

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, here Ferrer, Josep-Ramon here Fifth Generation Computer Project, Japan here Firefly driverless car here, here, here Fisher, Scott here, here Flood, Joe here Flow, Sidewalk Labs here flying cars here, here, here, here air-traffic control here Alef Aeronautics Model A here battery technology here business model operation here Carl Dietrich

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Lab here the Line, Saudi Arabia here linear cities here linear induction motor (LIM) here, here, here Linear Induction Motor Research Vehicle (LIMRV) here Link, Sidewalk Labs here lithium batteries here, here Llama, Facebook here Lobban, Joan here Lockheed Missiles here London Pneumatic Despatch Railway (LPDR) here longtermism here Los Angeles Community

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Shane, Janelle here Shannon, Claude here, here Shockley, William B. here Shoulders, Kenneth here SHRDLU here Sidewalk Labs, Alphabet here, here Simon, Herbert A. here, here Sketchpad program here, here smart cities here, here, here Alphabet Sidewalk Labs here Amaravati, India here Barcelona, Spain here BioDiverCity here Chengdu Future City, China here Clinton Foundation

Road to Nowhere: What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong About the Future of Transportation

by Paris Marx · 4 Jul 2022 · 295pp · 81,861 words

chairman Eric Schmidt appeared alongside the mayor of Toronto, the premier of Ontario, and the CEOs of Sidewalk Labs and Waterfront Toronto to announce a project they promised would forever change the city for the better. Sidewalk Labs, one of Google’s sister companies, had been chosen to build a city “from the internet

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public budgets,” she wrote in her resignation letter.2 Two weeks later, Ontario’s former privacy commissioner Ann Cavoukian, who served as an advisor to Sidewalk Labs, resigned after expressing significant concerns with how the company planned to treat the data it collected. Even though the project was pitched as a big

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win for Toronto and its residents, it quickly became apparent that Sidewalk Labs planned to integrate a host of its own technologies into the infrastructure of Canada’s largest city by using the twelve acres of land it

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had been contracted to transform as a beachhead, making the government and its residents dependent on them in perpetuity. In its expansive vision document, Sidewalk Labs outlined the many ways it wished to control urban systems. It planned to build a “digital layer” that would be the interface for access to

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local government, and the access terminals would be the exclusive containers for wireless technologies. That meant that for telecommunications companies to offer network services in Sidewalk Labs’ smart neighborhood, they would need its permission. Quayside, as the site was called, would also exclude private car traffic. Instead, there would be transit service

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and bike lanes, along with an autonomous shuttle service through Waymo—one of Sidewalk Labs’ sister companies—and access to ride-hailing services from Uber and Lyft. Notably, Google was invested in both companies. In addition

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, Sidewalk Labs wanted to get into healthcare through its Care Lab, control traffic with its Flow technologies, and place sensors throughout the urban landscape to run experiments

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through its Model Lab. There was no indication that the residents of Toronto would have input on the decisions that Sidewalk Labs and its technocratic leaders—many of whom had worked for Michael Bloomberg when he was mayor of New York City—were imposing on them. Given

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knew they had to fight back. In February 2019, concerned citizens launched a group called Block Sidewalk. They demanded the city halt the project after Sidewalks Labs “orchestrated a misleading, undemocratic engagement process that harm[ed] the public interest” and leaked documents confirmed it wanted to control a much larger area of

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or contracting for technology to meet those needs (if that was what was appropriate), the city and Waterfront Toronto were bending over backwards to allow Sidewalk Labs to impose its vision and its priorities on the residents of Toronto. Wylie, her colleagues, and a growing coalition of groups and citizens found that

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unacceptable. On May 7, 2020, Sidewalk Labs finally gave in and canceled the project. The residents of Toronto had won—but they were not the only ones turning against tech companies’ encroachment

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planning priorities—but the bigger question was whether cities would take it. In March 2021, Waterfront Toronto unveiled a new vision for the space that Sidewalk Labs had abandoned. Instead of a smart city, its proposal centered on great public spaces, sustainable development, and social housing—though it was not clear how

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,” in New Dimensions 3, ed. Richard Silverberg, Nelson Doubleday, 1973, p. 6. 29 Ibid., p. 7. Conclusion 1 “Announcing Sidewalk Toronto: Press Conference Live Stream,” Sidewalk Labs, October 17, 2017, YouTube.com. 2 Saadia Muzaffar, “My Full Resignation Letter from Waterfront Toronto’s Digital Strategy Advisory Panel,” Medium, October 8, 2018, Medium

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.com. 3 “Vision Sections of RFP Submission,” Sidewalk Labs, October 17, 2017, Sidewalklabs.com. 4 “Concerned Torontonians Launch #BlockSidewalk Campaign,” Block Sidewalk, February 25, 2019, Blocksidewalk.ca. 5 Laura Bliss, “Meet the Jane Jacobs

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of the Smart Cities Age,” CityLab, December 21, 2018, Bloomberg.com. 6 Dave Yasvinski, “Waterfront Toronto Releases New Vision for 12 Acres Abandoned by Sidewalk Labs,” National Post, March 10, 2021, Nationalpost.com. Index Abbott, Greg, 70 Acceptable Use Policy, 51 Ackerman, Emily, 173–4 Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), 39

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, 44 Camp, Garrett, 93 Canada bike lanes in, 171 intercity bus system in, 219 mineral supplies from, 79–80 ride-hailing services in, 99–100 Sidewalk Labs and, 228–9 carbon footprint, of micromobility services, 169–70 Carnegie Mellon University, 55, 119, 120 Carter, Jimmy, 204 Cavoukian, Ann, 229 Chicago, IL, ride

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system in, 170–1 Sheller, Mimi, 158, 207 Shell Oil City of Tomorrow, 2 Shill, Gregory, 30 shipping industry, 49 shut-in economy, 196–7 Sidewalk Labs, 228–30 Silicon Valley, 37–8, 44–5 skates (platforms), 146–7 Skyports, 154–5 Small Business Investment Company, 55 smart homes, 60–1 smartphone

Ghost Road: Beyond the Driverless Car

by Anthony M. Townsend · 15 Jun 2020 · 362pp · 97,288 words

designs are put forward under the guise of creating vast pedestrian-friendly zones free of cars. But developers like Google’s city-building sister company Sidewalk Labs also see them as a tool to keep human drivers away from computerized ones, further simplifying the challenge of rolling out safe AVs. The company

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, Governing jumped on the bandwagon with its own avaricious headline, “Cashing In on the Curb.” The author was Stephen Goldsmith, a Harvard University professor and Sidewalk Labs advisor. Even the sober-minded folks in the room seem to be losing their heads. “It’s the most valuable space that a city owns

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signs and markings entirely, and shifting the display of street rules to cyberspace. That’s the thinking at Coord, a spin-off of Alphabet’s Sidewalk Labs that’s busy building a massive database of cities’ street regulations. Beginning in 2017, Coord mappers fanned out across Seattle and San Francisco, driving up

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Museum, October 24, 2007, https://www.skyscraper.org/EXHIBITIONS/FUTURE_CITY/new_york_modern.htm. 210“the first place in the world”: Sidewalk Labs, RFP Submission for Waterfront Toronto (New York: Sidewalk Labs, 2017), 144. 210“Carriage squares”: Renate van der Zee, “Story of Cities #30: How This Amsterdam Inventor Gave Bike-Sharing to

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Guardian, April 26, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/apr/26/story-cities-amsterdam-bike-share-scheme. 210“a small zone that will serve”: Sidewalk Labs, RFP Submission for Waterfront Toronto, 144. 211the “beeping monster”: Shirley Zhao, “Tech Worries Throw Future of Hong Kong’s First Driverless Electric Bus Route into

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on demand, 130–32, 131 shipping costs decline in twentieth century, 130 shuttle lines in high-tech clusters, 100 shuttles. See driverless shuttles Shyp, 133 Sidewalk Labs, 209, 210, 211, 222, 232 Silverdome (Pontiac, MI), 196n SilverRide, 95 Singapore, 97, 167, 169, 177, 209, 211 singletons, 237–38 Singularity predictions, 234–35

The Future Is Faster Than You Think: How Converging Technologies Are Transforming Business, Industries, and Our Lives

by Peter H. Diamandis and Steven Kotler · 28 Jan 2020 · 501pp · 114,888 words

to coordinate emergency responses; Social Glass makes government procurement fast, compliant, and paperless. The larger tech companies are also in on the action. Alphabet’s Sidewalk Labs, for instance, is collaborating with the Canadian government on Quayside. In this smart community slated for Toronto’s industrial waterfront, robots deliver the mail, AI

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. OpenGov: See: https://opengov.com/. Social Glass: See: https://www.social.glass/. Alphabet’s Sidewalk Labs: Alissa Walker, “Here Is Sidewalk Labs’s Big Plan for Toronto,” Curbed, June 24, 2019. See: https://www.curbed.com/2019/6/24/18715669/sidewalk-labs-toronto-alphabet-google-quayside. Chapter Fourteen: The Five Great Migrations In their book Exceptional

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of mail order in, 95 robots and, 106–8 3–D body-scanning and, 114 3–D printing and, 108–11 VR and, 113–14 Sidewalk Labs, 235 Sikorsky, Igor, 9 Singularity, 76 Singularity University, xii, 8, 264, 266 Siri, 100, 132 Sirius XM, 152 “Six Ds of Exponentials,” 31 Skirball Cultural

The Future Is Analog: How to Create a More Human World

by David Sax · 15 Jan 2022 · 282pp · 93,783 words

robots! Here in Toronto, we saw the arrival of the digital city’s future in 2017, when Sidewalk Labs won a proposal to develop a smart neighborhood along the eastern part of the undeveloped waterfront. Sidewalk Labs was a division of Google’s parent company, Alphabet, headed up by Bloomberg’s former deputy mayor

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.” Roads would be optimized for self-driving vehicles, garbage would be collected automatically underground, digital layers of sensors would underpin everything, gathering the data that Sidewalk Labs would crunch to deliver even better solutions to residents. For a city that always saw itself as the eternal bridesmaid of North American urbanism, Sidewalk

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Toronto was a kiss from the digital fairy godmother. Shoshanna Saxe was skeptical of Sidewalk Labs from the start, but she understood its instant appeal to local politicians, business leaders, and other excited residents. She believes our attraction to the smart

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again as a PR performance. They rarely start from the problems.” Instead, smart cities offer digital solutions in search of an actual problem, like one Sidewalk Labs program in Columbus, Ohio, that proposed using driverless cars and ride sharing to bring patients to medical appointments as a solution to persistently high rates

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-based contact-tracing apps governments enthusiastically rolled out early on in the pandemic, which did precisely nothing to actually slow the spread of the virus. Sidewalk Labs didn’t get very far here in Toronto. It made a bunch of presentations and renderings, held some meetings, and opened an office across the

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down? Would Google pay to fix it? Or Toronto’s taxpayers? Others raised concerns about privacy and who would own all that tasty data that Sidewalk Labs (aka Google, aka Alphabet) planned to harvest. Most importantly, Torontonians asked, why was one of the world’s richest corporations being given the most valuable

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undeveloped real estate in the city for far less than market rate? What kind of future was this? Two months into Toronto’s pandemic lockdown, Sidewalk Labs quietly announced it was leaving town. The building that housed all that future promise was recently converted into a Budget car rental. “Sidewalk Toronto was

The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class

by Joel Kotkin · 11 May 2020 · 393pp · 91,257 words

/03/big-techs-monopolistic-rule-is-hiding-in-plain-sight/. 2 Henry Grabar, “Building Googletown,” Slate, October 25, 2017, https://slate.com/technology/2017/10/sidewalk-labs-quayside-development-in-toronto-is-googles-first-shot-at-building-a-city.html; Sophie Davies, “WiFi but No Water: Can Smart Tech Help a City

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-Valley-age-can-be-a-curse-4742365.php. 17 Susan Crawford, “Beware of Google’s Intentions,” Wired, February 1, 2018, https://www.wired.com/story/sidewalk-labs-toronto-google-risks/; Sidewalk Toronto, “Toronto Tomorrow,” https://sidewalktoronto.ca/#documents; Vipal Monga, “Toronto Oicials Question Alphabet Unit’s Ambitions for ‘Smart City,’” Wall Street

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Journal, June 24, 2019, https://www.wsj.com/articles/toronto-officials-question-alphabet-units-ambitions-for-smart-city-11561412851. 18 “Sidewalk Labs’s vision and your data privacy: A guide to the saga on Toronto’s waterfront,” Globe and Mail, June 24, 2019, https://www.theglobeandmail.com

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/canada/toronto/article-sidewalk-labs-quayside-toronto-waterfront-explainer/. 19 Crawford, “Beware of Google’s Intentions.” 20 “Albert Gidari,” Center for Internet and Society, Stanford Law School, http://cyberlaw.stanford

Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life

by Adam Greenfield · 29 May 2017 · 410pp · 119,823 words

thermostats and other home-automation systems, the Glass augmented reality visor, the Daydream VR headset, an autonomous-car initiative, the DeepMind artificial intelligence unit, the Sidewalk Labs smart-city effort, even the military robots produced by their Boston Dynamics division. There is surely something troubling, if not outright dystopian, about this particular

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date at which it plans to introduce its driverless technology;4 it now estimates its vehicles will be fielded commercially no sooner than 2020. The Sidewalk Labs unit stumbled early on, when reportage by the Guardian brought to light troubling aspects of its proposals to American municipalities (including a plan to spend

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Search, 218 Mail, 275 Maps, 24 Nest home automation division, 275–6 Nest thermostat, 275–6 Play, 18 Plus social network, 276 search results, 212 Sidewalk Labs, 276 Gladwell, Malcolm, 237 Glaser, Will, 220 Global Positioning System, 4, 16, 21, 26, 51, 67 Graeber, David, 205 Guangdong, 179 Guardian (newspaper), 276 Guattari

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, Richard, 70 SHA–256 hashing algorithm, 123 Shenzhen Special Economic Zone, 18–19, 43 Shodan search engine, 43 Shoreditch, London neighborhood, 136 Shteyngart, Gary, 246 Sidewalk Labs. See Google Siemens, 52–4, 56 Silk Road exchange, 131 Silver, David, 265 Simone, Nina, 261 Sipilä, Juha, 204 Sirer, Emin Gün, 178 Siri virtual

Data Action: Using Data for Public Good

by Sarah Williams · 14 Sep 2020

Microsoft launched its CityNext program, intending to draw from its worldwide network of technology experts to make cities better places.102 In 2015, Google launched Sidewalk Labs, a grouping of “urban innovation organizations” working on various projects including data analytics with the US Department of Transportation and developing a “smart city” solution

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71 Google Flu Trends (GFT) 130–131, 134, 215 Google Maps 54–55, 69, 95, 146 Google Maps transit directions 77, 149 Google Purchases 94 Sidewalk Labs 47 Waymo (autonomous vehicle program) 189 Govern, Maureen 197 Government(s). See also specific countries collection of data from citizens 78–79 protection from surveillance

The Sport and Prey of Capitalists

by Linda McQuaig · 30 Aug 2019 · 263pp · 79,016 words

to be in the interests of Canadians. Certainly, there are plenty of clever minds working on innovative schemes to exploit profit opportunities in infrastructure. Recently, Sidewalk Labs, a U.S. firm involved in building infrastructure for an experimental new neighbourhood on Toronto’s waterfront, devised a financing scheme that would allow it