The Conversation) In January 2019, Liberal MP Adam Vaughan argued that privacy concerns about the smart city proposed for Toronto's waterfront should not be allowed to ' reverse 25 years of good, solid work and 40 years of dreaming on the Toronto waterfront.'
But a recent survey suggests that Canadians have strong concerns about giving up on 50 years of struggle for privacy rights so that Google's sister company, Sidewalk Labs , can establish a smart city in Toronto.
Read more: Canadians are rightly worried about invasion of privacy in smart cities
Bell Canada and IBM Canada Ltd. are teaming up with the Toronto-area city of Markham, Ont., to test a new generation of systems for monitoring city infrastructure and detecting problems such as storm flooding.
The six-month research program that starts in April will combine Bell’s broadband networks, IBM data analytics and data from sensors placed in various parts of the city of 355,000 residents, northeast of Toronto.
The former privacy commissioner of Ontario recently resigned from a project to create a smart city in Toronto because there are no guarantees the collection of personal data would be kept private. Privacy is fundamental to freedom, says Ann Cavoukian, and smart cities being created around the world are not doing enough to guarantee it.
‘No opportunity to revoke consent’
Read more: CA: Smart cities threaten privacy, freedom, warns expert
Digital skills can no longer be seen as just an “IT” thing in government. A baseline level of digital literacy is need for every public servant.
Let’s take a step back in time 20 years to 1999. Personal computers were becoming more powerful and affordable, and increasingly a common part of work, school, and home life. The Internet as we know it was barely 10 years old. Web pages were starting to populate the World Wide Web at a dizzying rate. Governments were getting into the Internet scene, and Canada was kicking off its Government On-Line initiative, making available online 130 of its most commonly used services, spending $880 million to do it.
Read more: CA: The public service’s digital literacy problem
New details on Toronto neighborhood’s streetscape, affordable housing, and privacy protection
Sidewalk Labs, the urban innovation unit of Alphabet, Google’s parent company, will present a new plan for Quayside, its pioneering smart city development on Toronto’s east waterfront, further demonstrating how it aims to improve how cities operate with a bottom-up reimagining of tech’s place in urban living.