
Welcome to the neighbourhood, have you read the terms of service? - mhb
http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/smart-cities-privacy-data-personal-information-sidewalk-1.4488145
======
userbinator
It seems almost a given that whenever the term "smart" is applied to anything,
it's something that tries to monitor, monetise, or otherwise resist your
attempts at controlling it --- instead, it attempts to control _you_.

There's enough dystopian science fiction out there that the only thing I think
when I hear "smart" is "No thanks."

~~~
TeMPOraL
Regarding "smart devices" and IoT, honestly, I don't qualify it as
_dystopian_. To me, it's just _pathetic_.

A "smart", unnecessarily Internet-connected kettle or lightbulb or juicer
isn't going to usher the second coming of fascism to the Western world. Even
data breaches connected to those devices aren't going to have any meaningful
impact on an average person's life. But it's sad, because it's wasteful. It's
ugly. It's _bad engineering_. And all of this is motivated by greed and
sociopathy of people putting it on the market. With each everyday item that
gets attached to my butt, I lose faith in people a little more.

~~~
toss1
yup, I just want a thermostat that I can remotely access -directly- and _not_
through someone else's server. Just keep track of my IP addr myself, and yes
if the ISP swaps it out for another I'll have to update it when I get there
again... blah, blah, blah, yes' it'd be fine with me.

Yet I cannot fine one. Every single 'smart' thermostat has some corporate
service I have to negotiate through for access, and of course if that is down,
well, I'm outta luck. and, they're surely accumulating all of my data.

Anybody know of one?

~~~
TheRealEdAbbey
The problem is there isn't really much of a market for something like that.
Sure, you can have detailed documentation on such a product that explains how
it's functioning, why it might drop out when your ip changes, etc., but who is
going to understand that? People like you and me, yes, but we're a pretty
small market.

In order for there to be a reasonable audience for a product, you have to
target the least knowledgeable person - or at least someone pretty far south
of the median. Those people aren't going to understand what's happening, and
they're going to get upset each time their ip resets and they can't connect to
their thermostat anymore. They're going to take the frustration to the
thermostat company, they're not going to understand what the service rep tells
them, and they're going to return the product, leave a bad review, and buy a
nest.

No one wants to be in the position of making and selling such a product.
That's why you pretty much need to make your own with an esp8266. And that's
why so many of these IoT devices end up being far too bloated.

~~~
alsetmusic
> The problem is there isn't really much of a market for something like that.
> Sure, you can have detailed documentation on such a product that explains
> how it's functioning, why it might drop out when your ip changes, etc., but
> who is going to understand that? People like you and me, yes, but we're a
> pretty small market.

I understand why this is not available as a standalone product. The window is
probably too small to warrant it. I don’t understand why no company appears to
offer it as an option to a product that otherwise “just works.”

Sure, it would require additional investment on the part of the manufacturer
to include an “expert-mode” toggle that lets the user make their own
decisions, but a market exists for people who want that. Money is being left
on the table.

~~~
toss1
>> Money is being left on the table.

It sure is -- I'd buy that immediately.

The nice part about it is, if their "cloud" services actually added value, I'd
be happy to sign up for that too.

I just want a direct access and a fall-back if their cloud goes offline (and I
read about that happening in the reviews of every single one).

And sure, we're a subset of the market, but I'd expect a sufficiently large
subset to make it worthwhile.

If it was a really good unit with high-quality sensors, WiFi connectors and
other components, I'd pay more than for a Nest.

------
walterbell
NYCLU and Columbia University have a 2016 video (starts at 2:50) about the
corporate origins and privacy policy of Google's LinkNYC surveillance kiosks
in Manhattan:
[https://livestream.com/internetsociety/hopeconf/videos/13081...](https://livestream.com/internetsociety/hopeconf/videos/130816888)

Village Voice covered the topic,
[https://www.villagevoice.com/2016/07/06/google-is-
transformi...](https://www.villagevoice.com/2016/07/06/google-is-transforming-
nycs-payphones-into-a-personalized-propaganda-engine/)

 _This freedom to opt out entirely is also the last argument that spokespeople
for LinkNYC and the city itself fall back upon when challenged with privacy
concerns: If you don’t like it, you’re welcome not to use it. It’s a
disheartening place to land, especially when discussing infrastructure that’s
supposed to be serving people who aren’t served otherwise. To Moglen, it’s
simply an unacceptable conclusion. “That’s what they want us to believe, that
we have a choice between isolation and monitored connecting,” he says. “Those
are not adequate choices in a 21st-century world: We are designing the net to
track you — if you don’t like it, don’t use it. The human race is shifting to
a fully surveilled and monitored superorganism — if you don’t like that, stop
being human. That’s a poor outcome. The United States is a society that was
based around the idea that human beings can have liberty. So give us liberty!
And don’t tell us that otherwise we can have the death of the net._

------
ppeetteerr
You can have a smart city without assigning a unique identifier to each
individual between collections of data (ie by relying on aggregate data
instead), or using the equivalent of a session identifier.

For instance, a trashcan filling up can correlate to the number of people who
use public transport, but you don't have to say person X took the bus then
used the trash can.

~~~
ISL
But you can correlate the timeseries of crosswalk events that leave from one
city block, follow a regular pattern, then a bus boarding, then a bus
departure, then a regular trash-can event.

Do a thing regularly, or have enough "anonymized" sensors with sufficient
resolution, and one can mine a lot from apparently very little.

~~~
vorpalhex
Even if the system doesn't do this directly, it's easy for a contractor with
the data to do as much if the data is highly accurate.

I hope that some mitigations are being put in place by limiting data accuracy
to relatively wide windows (and the wideness of those windows will need to
vary depending on how busy a thing is).

~~~
bo1024
This is the kind of thing that the field of "differential privacy" excels at
and should be used for!

------
ucaetano
When I read the title I thought the piece was on neighborhoods controlled by
NIMBY associations.

------
Animats
I wonder what Apple would do if you leased some rooftop space in the mall
across the street from the entrance to their new HQ and aimed cameras at the
entrance, recording every license plate going in and out? Then buy the CA DMV
records, which you can do for marketing purposes, and use that to build an
employee list to be sold to recruiters.

~~~
donarb
How would you correlate an Apple employee's job title with a recruiter's
requirements using just a license plate number?

~~~
joncrane
Year, make, and model of the car would be a good proxy. If not for job title,
then for propensity to spend on luxury items.

~~~
Animats
Once you have license numbers, you can get names. Once you have names, you can
look at LinkedIn, Facebook, and CiteSeeer to see what they're into.

You can also gather intelligence on what Apple is working on. More AI people?
More voice recognition people? More chip designers? More phone sales people?

------
pavel_lishin
Kind of hoping Charles Stross finds some time to comment on this. I know he's
written a blog post on what happens to cities as microprocessors get tiny and
cheap, but I can't find it right now. (Doesn't help that his blog seems to be
taking about 15 seconds to load each page.)

~~~
ceejayoz
His latest book, Dark State, has quite a bit of scary speculation on this as
well. There's a depiction of a SWAT raid in it that's a fun read until you
realize it's only a few years off from potential reality.

~~~
j_s
Looks like you meant Dark State:
[https://amzn.com/B072TZC99F](https://amzn.com/B072TZC99F)

~~~
ceejayoz
Ack, yes! Thanks.

------
Shivetya
a bit like "Oath of Fealty" where everything is watched with it implied "not
all the time". Where you have a hint of privacy but none really at all with
those who hold the keys. The real threat isn't the promises made today, its
what the next guy in charge does with it.

in the US there have been concerns already raised over surveillance from
license plate scanners to body cameras. The idea they won't have identifiable
data flies in the face of the language used to protect law enforcement
scanning license plates and its not far behind before body camera recordings
are the same.

------
FilterSweep
> Generally speaking, the idea is that all of this data — and the newfound
> insights its analysis could yield — will help cities run more efficiently
> and innovate at a faster pace than they do today.

Is there a source for that claim?

Or, do these newfound insights merely help Alphabet provided more specialized
services to communities (a net _gain_ , I guess), and provide a substantially
larger operating budget for lobbying?

------
ggm
If you read a headline that the national government of a large asian economy
was deploying a million cameras you would go to statist surveillence. If you
read a more nuanced headline that in a large asian economy, a million
privately owned cameras have been deployed, as locals chose to arm up against
bad behaviour, perceived threats or nosiness, you might feel different.

I am told the latter is actually as common as the former, in the aforesaid
large asian economy. The state cameras are on poles and buildings, and are at
similar densities to the UK in that regard (within order of magnitude) Whereas
the cheap, hackable (crackably hackable, risably simply crackably hackable)
IoT IP enabled cameras are being bought and sold for $50 or less, and
installed freehand by concerned locals who wonder why their pet cat keeps
disappearing.

It is now routine for police to ask citizens for dashcam and other static
camera footage when investigating crime. The locals with cameras are often
very happy to comply.

Is this boil the frog slowly?

------
SEJeff
When it comes to "Smart Cities" in the US at least, Chicago is leading the
pack:

[http://arrayofthings.github.io/](http://arrayofthings.github.io/)

~~~
reaperducer
Chicago keeps trying to be super-technology-world, but it doesn't always work.

More than a decade ago, Google promised to bring free wi-fi to the entire
city. The idea was to put an AP on every light pole. Lots of press. Lots of TV
interviews. No internet.

It never occurred to Google that when the light on a light pole goes off, the
power to the entire pole is turned off. And not just that pole, but every
other pole it's connected to. Big G was counting on powering the AP's off of
the light circuit, which is actually turned off miles away. Simple, reliable,
century-old "dumb" technology.

But Chicago keeps plugging along. There are victories, too. But the failures
are more fun.

~~~
SEJeff
Great example of failing, but this one isn't. I was worried tbh when I saw the
detector go up in my neighborhood (the pole detectors used to only be gunshot
mics in high crime neighborhoods, which mine is not!). I did some inquiring
and realized it is a university project to make the city better via anonymous
data. The idea is absolutely fantastic. What they ultimately do with said data
is how we see if this experiment fails or not. So far, it seems to be pretty
useful.

------
ajeet_dhaliwal
When I saw the title and saw it was cbc.ca I thought the article would be
about the maddening state of city by-laws. That was personally a more pressing
issue for me when I lived in Canada than potential issues around smart city
privacy.

------
shyn3
The public should provide a fair exchange here.

Allow Sidewalk Labs to build any infrastructure they like irrespective of
laws.

Once done, hire whitehats/blackhats, and if they are able to access any
information, shutdown the project.

~~~
jstanley
I don't see how that is a fair exchange.

There's every chance that Sidewalk Labs would get to build infrastructure that
would otherwise be illegal, and collects data that people don't want
collected, just because nobody outside Sidewalk Labs managed to get access to
the data.

Even people _inside_ Sidewalk Labs shouldn't have the data. The data shouldn't
be collected in the first place.

~~~
shyn3
If they can build a stable, private, secure system which can increase the
quality of life, then I am all for it.

The data seems to be needed to be able to adapt to the ever changing
conditions.

Two big issues they can help alleviate, homelessness and addiction.

~~~
dcole2929
Ok I'll bite. How can collecting this data, in any way, help alleviate
homelessness or addiction?

~~~
shyn3
If you don't try to enact these projects how are you going to know the value
they derive. The data collection is a necessary part of optimizing the
solution.

Edit: The Sidewalks Lab project is building a city. Toronto can move any
people who need assistance into the society. It almost sounds like a thought
experiment, but with the resources they have access to, they would be better
able to assist than the city.

For example, Toronto doesn't have enough safe injection sites. The data would
help to highlight that if it is collected.

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jslakro
All our efforts on industrialization are targeted to cover our primary needs,
one by one. The main objective on industrialized farms and productive chains
from rural areas have been to mantain us supplied to keep working on
centrilized and populated urban centers. Now, all needs will be covered by
automated tasks, we cannot became artificial agents on a flesh and bone
network, fulfilling standard protocols and alienating our minds Why not just
turn off the machines in farms, keep the city empty and retake our natural
environment. Let's Make the robots deal with all required tech tasks, teach
them an Anti AI (for avoiding skynet) and then we could have again a real life
living in the country side

