PAULA GARDNER: So let's begin. So welcome everyone to this session, which is entitled 'Surveillance in the City'.
Very excited to introduce this panel to you and I want to thank the Conference organizers who have done Herculean work
organizing this conference, the amazing keynotes and really doing it now for a period of a year and a half, I think, and still, you know,
with such great enthusiasm and I've learned a lot from the panels and the keynotes, it's been it's been just a pleasure.
So, the first thing I want to do is offer a land acknowledgment, and then i'll introduce the panelists.
So, today we are gathered in many spaces, where we live in work on traditional territories of Indigenous peoples.
McMaster University is situated on the traditional territories of the Erie, Neutral, Huron-Wendat, Haudenosaunee, and Mississaugas.
This land is covered by the Dish with one Spoon wampum belt covenant, and we understand that this agreement requires that all of us
living on this land, share and care for the resources here, collaboratively.
We also acknowledge the land is covered by the Between the Lakes purchase from 1792 between the Crown and
the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation. Hamilton and the other places from which we speak today Toronto, St. Catherine's, etc.,
and Hamilton are home today to vibrant First Nation, Metis, and Inuit people and communities who hail from across Turtle Island.
And today we're reflecting on our responsibilities to learn about and honor the different treaties across our regions.
And to recognize that our prosperous living standards are accountable to the complicated and often extractive history of
settlement here in Canada. And to realize the ongoing vitality of Indigenous peoples.
And I'll introduce our panelists. I'm going to introduce them in the order in which they're speaking. This is organized as a panel, where each
person will give about a 10-minute talk with slides, i'll make you each a co-host in case you have a deck I assume you do,
After those five presentations, I'll invite you to put some questions in the chat and I will read them out for you and we're hoping to have about
20 minutes for conversation across the panelists and with all of you.
So first we have Dr. Beth Coleman.
BETH COLEMAN is an Associate Professor of Data and Cities at the Institute of Communication, Culture, and Information and Technology,
and the Faculty of Information at University of Toronto, where she directs the City as Platform Lab.
Working in the disciplines of science and technology studies, and critical race theory her research focuses on smart technology,
machine learning, urban data, and civic engagement.
And I'll ask you to look at all of their bios online that is prolific and has a number of manuscripts and articles and
important journals in this area. Today, her talk is activating context, disruptive data pedagogies, and smart infrastructure.
Next, we have Cynthia Kuan-Yun Wang. Cynthia is a PhD student in a joint program of communication and cultural studies at York and Ryerson.
Her main research focus is visual culture in Palestine. She's interested in the representation of Palestinian women in the news media,
and entertainment industries, using a feminist settler-colonial lens,
and exploring how representation has impacted identity construction for Palestinian women. Her talk is
Surveillance and Palestinian Bodies in the COVID-19 pandemic.
Dr. Michael Darroch is Associate Dean of Academic and Associate Professor of Cinema and Media Arts in School of the Arts,
Media Performance and Design at York University.
He previously served as Associate Dean at the University of Windsor where he taught courses in media art histories,
visual culture, and urban ecologies in the school of creative arts. He's currently co-director of the Research Creation Club called IN/TERMINUS,
focused on participatory art and exhibition curation. In the Windsor-Detroit urban borderlands he has lots of publications in this area of research and curation.
And his title, the title of his talk is 'Open Cities in the border region: Detroit and Windsor.'
Blayne Haggart is Associate Professor of Political Science at York University, he's the author of Copyfight: The Global Politics of Digital Copyright Reform, 2014,
and co-editor with Natasha Tusikov,
and Jan Aart Scholte of Power and Authority in Internet Governance, Return of the State, and other publications.
He's senior fellow with the Center for international governments innovation in Waterloo Canada, so please see the bio for more.
More background, all of these folks. The title of his talk is Surveillance, Marketing and Misdirection: The Selling of Toronto's Smart City.
And finally, Dr.Natasha Tusikov is Assistant Professor of Criminology at York University and visiting fellow with the School of Regulation
and Global Governance at the Australian National University.
She's the author of Choke Points: Global Private Recognition on the Internet, co-editor of Intuition Technology and Control in a Changing World,
2019, again many publications in this area. Her talk is entitled Signage, Consent, and Data Standard Setting in the Smart City.
And we're very excited for this panel.
BETH COLEMAN: Okay, thank you Paula and Sarah for the invitation it's been a long time coming, and it's really,
quite exciting and wonderful to have this group of people to engage with, so I'm really looking forward to hearing your papers and I'm
not going to talk about Sidewalk Labs because I think you guys have it covered.
Gonna go in different direction on that, so let me share screen and get my timer going.
And - So I can keep an eye on the time.
Okay, so in thinking about urban surveillance, what if risk is the better civic framework over the conventional wisdom of privacy?
So, obviously that's meant as a provocation,
In this slide I asked how are ubiquitous automation technologies or 'smart', such as bluetooth and visual capture IOT deployed in public space.
I look at several case studies of smart urban installations, such as the Toronto King street pilot,
the New York City LinkNYC wi-fi kiosks, to discuss issues of design ontology, data sovereignty, and the smart telcos of efficiency.
In many ways, these urban installations are the ideal picture of smart technology application,
yet I'm interested in the slippage between the language and methods of efficiency and the complexities of deploying what are, in effect,
surveillance technologies in public space.
If one looks closely the structure of data acquisition holding and analysis, one finds a complicated scenario of efficiency
obfuscating the design values of transparency, consent, and privacy.
Part of the attraction of such case studies is that the city agents are largely working toward a public good.
It is the complexity and invisibility of machine to machine M to M automation that presents new challenges for human computer interaction.
Increasingly, the contours of a data driven society are shaped by the transformation of nearly all interactions - monetary,
communication, vocational, etc., in a modality of quantifiable data.
The significance of this is profound and often largely invisible.
In making visible the infrastructure and ontology of such public works projects,
I ask a broader question regarding smart technology in the context and the civic status of data ethics and data sovereignty with
implications for data justice. So I want to just pause for one second and acknowledge my co authors,
Neha Ravella and Madison Mackley, to the RAs in the cities platform lab.
So thinking about data publics,
and emerging socio technical urban relations, it seems to be a given at this point that part of our public sphere is data,
how it is moving back, how it's intermingled how it is shared. So digital infrastructure is not-
Is central to what we're looking at here. So in framing a data practice and urban public space, what happens to public space
with the emergence of AI, so this is IOT, smart events, automation etc.
And infrastructures. We friend this research in relation to the standard municipal operating procedures of policy gaps,
accelerating technological affordances and a civic imaginary of citizen inclusion and exclusions.
Standard procedure in most cities has been to obfuscate technical forms of data extraction and the abuse
of civic privacy in service of urban infrastructures
that speak to efficiencies and optimizations as a new normal. So this paper looks at the two case studies that I pointed to
King Street Pilot, and the LinkNYC kiosks. LinkNYC in New York is off the table for the moment because we're just going to focus on Toronto.
So the King Street Pilot engages IOT technologies to produce better traffic flow and public transportation efficiency
in the most densely traffic areas of the city of Toronto.
After one year the Toronto King Street Pilot was ratified as a permanent installation in February 2020,
and is now the basis for the city of Toronto's digital infrastructure plan. So not only
were we the test bed, now we are the - or, that experiment is the template moving forward in terms of digital infrastructure policy.
So, in looking at the relationship between data policy on privacy, among other issues, in relationship to the technical capacity of IOT
and other smart technologies,
what we have is a not unusual disconnect between the technology is racing ahead and the policy is set in a particular place.
So i'm trying to look at some of the gaps between those two.
Okay, Data infrastructure, so models of obfuscation versus models of trust.
So, given normative data, big data practices, how might we reimagine municipal data
that are aligned with civic knowledge mobilization and engagement? And I think some of you are touching some of the same points.
In other words, how do we move toward actual frameworks, methods, and attentions establishing the research field of
critical data, critical infrastructure, and critical policy studies to address normative data methods.
If a standard consideration of municipal, corporate and, engineering interest in data driven public works is social good,
then our work is to craft relations to knowledge and power
in the ability of technological arrays with the position of the civic, particularly in relationship to marginalize, minoritize,
and expose populations.
So this is the notion of Data publics that I've touched on already,
and in thinking about models of obfuscation versus models of trust, I want to point to a piece of work that's
politicized and moving and important - The Feminist Fata Manifest-No,
which talks about we refuse to operate under the assumption that risk and the harm associated with data practices can be bounded
to mean the same thing for everyone, everywhere, every time we commit to acknowledging how historical and systemic patterns
of violence and exploitation produce different vulnerabilities for communities. So this co authored document, which is very much
principles of feminist SDS praxis,
talks about a right of refusal, in the context of ubiquitous computing, as demonstrated by IOT technology arrays. So my question is not
to push against the idea of a manifest-no, but asking how actually in practice moving every day on the city street can that be enacted.
A civic actor might choose to block, dodge, and refuse to have their data taken up by pervasive sensor technologies,
but such a refusal occupies hours of resistant Labor in the form of faraday cages, camper surveillance camouflage,
and other tactical modes of resistance to a surveillance net framework.
Our analysis is that such an endeavor at the individual level is exhausting and that's not sustainable, as a mode of civic engagement.
The call for refusal, the current state of affairs extractive and exploitation of data practices must be arrested immediately,
That's what the manifest is calling for, and yet,
even if one is an agreement with such principles, it's hard to fathom how they would be enacted at the level of the individual
and at the level of the everyday because this is what we are looking at.
So, as I mentioned, King Street Pilot becomes the template for the digital infrastructure plan for Toronto.
It stated goals are moving people more efficiently, support economic prosperity, and improved place making
and essentially, even the people who designed the pilot admit that it's only the first one moving people more efficiently
that can be properly tested in the type of pilot that they were running.
So video produced by the city dramatizes his goals by showing a time lapse image of a congested King Street
evolving into a spacious colorful pedestrian walkway
where cars are not seen and the street car move smoothly and quickly across its route. The language of efficiency is a common and powerful
rhetorical device that often appears in arguments for data driven smart city design.
Implicit in the application of efficiency,
through technological design is the ethos of good life. Place making is often a scribe as a natural corollary of the efficient decluttering
of city streets and thoroughfares. The imaginary produced around such a vision, at least in the design phase is about happy pedestrians,
as opposed to any kind of diachromatic
attribution of how information is being moved in the system and what we see with just looking at the hardware installation
that exists on King Street it's been there for several years now, is you get
360 surveillance cameras, digital surveillance cameras, they're supposed to have a particular behavior about not leaving a trace in terms of
translating a video feed into a data point, whether it's a cyclist or a car or a pedestrian. And then we also have bluetooth so it's sniffing
devices from the cell phone or in doordash etc um, this is the pathway of the pilot.
But the primary thing that I want to leave you with is we've got
fairly detailed data analysis in terms of what is taken by these devices and what is then published by the City of Toronto,
in terms of open data and then what is published as a reporting on this project
in the aggregation of the dashboard, and the big problem is all the way along the line, there is no opportunity for consent,
there is no knowledge mobilization around the nature of this installation disarray, and you just have this
framework for a certain kind of data practice that is then going to be rolled out across different aspects of the city digital infrastructure.
Okay, I think that is my time, so I will pass the mic over. Thank you.
PAULA GARDNER: Thank you so much Beth, and we'll move right on to Cynthia Kuan-Yun Wang.
CYNTHIA KUANYUN WANG: Thank you Paula and thank you Beth this is such a great presentation and let me try to share my screen.
Good afternoon, and thank you all for being here, my name is Kuan-Yun Wang, I also go by Cynthia.
I'm a first year PhD student in the program of Communication and Culture at York University so i'm really humbled
to be part of this panel with all of you who are experts in this field, so pardon me if I seem a little bit nervous.
And my topic for today's presentation is Surveillance Capitalism and the Political Economy of Technology in the Global "War on Terror" ideological battlefield.
And my specific case study is Palestine during the COVID-19 pandemic, and the main question I seek to explore is how
do surveillance technology and the political economy of surveillance industry intersect with the discourse of counterterrorism,
national security, and racing Palestine.
So, surveillance has become an in-separate part of our life and they also gradually become the Center of the
global political economy in the 21st century.
Surveillance capitalism allows our private human experiences to be coded and translated into free
raw material and behavioral data according to Shoshana Zuboff, the author of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism,
and so this is aimed to improve the process of prediction on what the targeted human subjects is likely to behave or react in the future.
And these data for prediction eventually just become valuable products
in a capitalist marketplace. So like governments, companies, and state agencies can purchase these information products
in order to know how the future goes, and they have the power to manipulate or change the behaviors based on what is in their best interest.
And surveillance capitalism began to flourish right around the time when the 9/11 events happened, and since that time,
the rising concern and obsession with security and mass employment of surveillance technologies around the world
has began, especially high. And the war on terror, the scores was brought into the global political agenda and terrorists
and terrorism became the universal enemy of Western democracy.
So the policing and resistance against the Israeli occupation has long being framed as terror attacks and terrorism in the news.
And the connections between the US war on terror and the Isralis security and surveillance technology industry are in fact inseparable.
The 9/11 attack and the booming surveillance industry is a critical turning point for Israels economy.
In 2006 Isreal export it over 1 billion on security and surveillance technologies, this is counted as 20% on their 2005 economic figure.
And the 2016 report compiled by privacy international showed that Israel has the highest number of surveillance companies
per capita of any country in the world, which is 8 times more than United States who is ranked as the second place.
And the Financial Times in 2015 has indicated that the Israeli companies make approximately 10% off the global cyber security market.
So the other crucial points thats worth mentioning here is what Stephen Graham defines as an urban warfare laboratory.
Because it sure has been able to test its technology on the Palestinians in the occupied territories in the Gaza Strip,
to improve its functionality and the accuracy before putting it out in the market.
The other example is discussed by Nicholas Mirzoeff, he says, the Israeli drones in Gaza do not recognize Palestinians individually.
On the contrary, it identifies which area have a higher possibility for terrorist attack and it detects targets based on mobile SIM card.
So every Palestinian in Gaza Strip, who carries a phone with a SIM card become a suspect. They are not -
They are coded as data for the drone machine detectors. So very similar to this way, the case of examining surveillance during the
COVID-19 pandemic, postings are also being categorized and always thought to their mobile phone information data.
The outbreak of COVID-19 pandemic in Israel has resulted in the government announcing two emergency regulations.
But the most controversial parts in these regulations is that it authorized the security agency to track the location information
of citizens who potentially were infected or have been in contact with COVID positive patients.
Even though Israel is not the only country who use technology to monitor citizens, it is the only country in the world to order
its internal security agency to deal with a medical crisis.
In Israeli Professor Avi Marciano's latest publication in 2021, he points out that apart from allowing the security agency to surveil,
the investigations on pandemic cases have transferred from the hand of Ministry of Health to the Ministry of Defense.
So these acts of securitization, to put in his words, were I quote "accompanied by a particular discourse in which notable politicians
and policymakers employ explicitly militaristic terminology to communicate Israeli Security Agency surveillance to the public,
thereby legitimising securitization of the pandemic and surveillance in particular.
The regulations, although apply to both Israelis and Palestinians, it happily influences and, in truth, Palestinians deeper.
For Palestinians leaving the occupied territories, to hold a valley permits to enter Israel in order to work, go to school, visit family,
or fulfill medical appointments, they are asked to download The Coordinator app on their phone,
and the office of renewing their visa had closed due to the outbreak, so it leaves these Palestinians no other option but to download this app.
And there are three major categories of information this app will collect. The first is users geographical location, second is phone camera,
and the third is the messages and files stored on the phone.
So let's take a quick look at the registration page for this App. It states that the personal, private data being retrieved from their phone
will be stored in the database based on the Israeli security agencies consideration,
and the data will be used for any purpose, including for security purposes as they see fit.
So, in response to the criticisms to work this app, the office insists that this app is developed in light of the spread of COVID-19
and for the benefit of the Palestinian public.
However, the most critical part of this app is not why this type of surveillance technologies are being used at this moment,
but it all comes down to the question of who is watching the coding and storing this data.
The fact that all personal data is authorized for the security agency to make use of, and this is a department that is established and functions
based on counterterrorism and espionage missions.
So the framing of security and public both here is not really about the concern of the public policy and public health.
So reflecting back to the notion of surveillance capitalism, as Zuboff describes,
what's really happening is that we provide personal data and information, but the information we provide is the least important part of the
information that they collect about us.
These companies collect data to analyze and to train models and patterns of human behaviour.
Once they have a big training model, they can see how people with these characteristics possibly behave and that allows them to predict
what people are likely to do, not only now but soon and later in the future.
And according to several news reports, the uninstall group, one of the Israeli surveillance company known for manufacturing spyware,
is in talk with the Israeli Defense Minister last year and have been thinking of ways to develop a risk rating system
that has the potential to sell to some other governments in the near future.
And this system is said to be able to predict and identify on the scale of one to 10, the likelihood of a person being potential COVID positive just
through accessing their personal information.
So development in technologies is inevitable and extremely important for our lives but surveillance capitalism and intrusive tracking should not be part of this development.
Even we think we have nothing to hide, the purpose of objecting to intrusive surveillance is more about that,
as we already know that the data we submit voluntarily isn't the only thing we're taking away from.
We should also speak up against the involuntary forced data information retrieval of Palestinians taken by the Isreali Security Agency,
because it should not be normal for any governments companies and businesses to be able to track or detect our preferences.
So, here are some of the articles and books I mentioned today, and thank you for listening.
PAULA GARDNER: Wonderful, thank you Kuan-Yun.
PAULA GARDNER: We are on to Michael Darroch.
MICHAEL DARROCH: Alright, thank you so much, this is very exciting, I think this is maybe the first conference I participated in over a year, at this point.
Okay.
This is part of a (inaudible) funded project and I do want to acknowledge my co-investigators and collaborators.
It's a project to review and consider histories of media migration and mapping in the Windsor-Detroit region,
and so my colleagues at the University of Windsor, Lee Rodney and Rob Nelson and my colleague at York Karen Engle have all contributed to the research.
While divided by the international border, the cities of Windsor and Detroit, long constituted the curiously integrated urban environment
Our interest has been to consider life on the border itself as a kind of perpetual form of urban surveillance.
Windsor rights we have argued have been intimate on (inaudible)
the urban experience of Detroit, while Detroiters at times both envy and misunderstand their smaller neighbour city.
Part of this research is beginning to investigate open data portal and data driven initiatives to consider ways in which the cities are
connected, but also remain distinctly disconnected on a range of informational scales.
Marshall McLuhan's assertion that a border is not a connection but an interval of resonance, continues to evoke a compelling framework
in understanding cultural borderlands in the 21st century. As intervals are both spatial and temporal, McLuhan's metaphor lends
itself to discussing the many network and media types characteristics of treading border environments.
Borders today are characterized as sights of exclusion
and inclusion permeated by customs and security technologies and infrastructures, networks of communication among families,
migrants, refugees, sanctuary institutions, and settlement organizations, as well as the politics of terrorism immigration, and elaborate transit.
And it was not so long ago that a dream of a borderless world seemed infectious after the establishment of the (inaudible)
and the fall of the Berlin Wall in what now appears to be the more (inaudible) political climate of the 1980's and 90s.
Since 9/11, the US, Canada border, once spoken of affectionately as the world's longest undefended border has increasingly hardened
for people, while efforts to strengthen cross border trade have intensified.
PAULA GARDNER: Michael?
MICHAEL DARROCH: Yeah?
PAULA GARDNER: There's a there's a little bit of noise on the mic I'm not sure -
It seems like maybe it's a distance issue or moving closer might mediate it.
MICHAEL DARROCH: There's no sound here but I can -
Sara Bannerman (Conference Team)(she/her): You may have some papers, moving on top of your computer.
MICHAEL DARROCH: That's possible I'll keep everything off.
PAULA GARDNER: I just want us to be able to hear.
MICHAEL DARROCH: Can you still hear me now?
PAULA GARDNER: That's good. Sorry to interrupt. MICHAEL DARROCH: Okay.
MICHAEL DARROCH: Oh no, thank you.
MICHAEL DARROCH: Borders enter into our technological imaginaries in multiple forms and formats.
If, as as Arthur Croaker once argued, a discourse on technology is central to the Canadian imagination, because it is situated
midway between the future of the new world and past of European culture.
Between the rapid unfolding as a technological imperative and American empire and the classic origins of the technological dynamo
and European history, we need perhaps look no farther than the Detroit-Windsor borderlands at the heart of industrialized North America.
As the most important international crossing for the North American Free Trade Agreement and its successor, the US MCA brokered in 2018,
The Windsor-Detroit borderlands also offer a spatial metaphor for many of the national cliches and then identity anxieties
that preoccupied Canadians in the North American context.
Through their shared histories of colonial expansion, international networks of manufacturing and trade, and coordinated management
of waterways and air pollution, the cities have long been linked by cross border mobilities of people, labor, goods, and information.
The border crossings between Windsor and Detroit are noted for the high volume of trade that passes at the narrows of the Detroit river,
which has facilitated the Trans-national development of the auto industry for over a century. Truck traffic on the Ambassador Bridge
became notorious after 9/11 as the crossing became a choke point and security concerns
increased. While the new proposed Gordie Howe Bridge in the 21st century is proposed to enhance a smart border and is still under construction.
Windsor and Detroit are also one of the most populated cross border urban regions in North America.
The two cities are separated by the River, the Detroit river in Lake Erie and lake St.Clair, and joined by the Ambassador Bridge
and the Detroit-Windsor tunnel.
This interconnected urban fabric has developed over two centuries and has only recently been divided by the thickening of the border
in the last two decades. The Canada/U.S border has now been closed to travellers for over a year,
since March 21, 2020. Crossing is now limited to essential workers from Windsor who work at one of Detroit's many hospitals, for example.
With the exception of brief periods of closure after September 11, 2001, the situation is unprecedented.
The Detroit sector was established in 1926 along with the El Paso sector as the first two stations for the US border patrol agents.
For much of the 20th century, traffic between the two cities was heavy. The Detroit-Windsor tunnel and the Ambassador Bridge were
progressive era projects that accompanied the expansion of the auto industry and encouraged the adaptation of the automobile
as a cultural symbol of efficiency and a way of life. Prior to 1945 however, most traffic still move by ferries.
Such as these, which cross the River multiple times a day, shuttling commuters and cross border shoppers as well as immigrants
between the two inner-city centers.
By the late 1950s Detroit and Windsor were beginning to envision the region as a modern cross border international metropolis.
As Detroit prepared for a bid for the 1964 Olympics, the Americanada Teleferry project was floated in the spirit of the times as a cross border
gondola that was proposed to link Detroit's Cobo Center from Windsor's waterfront in the early 1960s.
Residents of Windsor and Detroit, the surveillance experience of the border over these postwar pre 9/11 decades was merely a slight inconvenience.
Passports were not required in a non-verbal wave through was not out of the ordinary when crossing.
For the most part, the only stress was whether or not the Canadian border guards would notice the layering of newly bought clothes
that returning Windsorites were wearing or smuggling, after a day of shopping in Detroit. And in fact older Windsorites today state
that shopping downtown in the 1950s and 60s meant downtown Detroit.
Arab Canadians testify to the same nonchalance from border guards, even in the 1990s, when entering the USA at this border.
All this would change quite suddenly on 9/11 when the border became a hard and fast division cutting through the heart of an old
and deeply established cross river community.
And like the COVID-19 crisis over the border did shortly reopen to most traffic. In the early months after 9/11 many encountered
three hour delays and their likelihood of being pulled into secondary by the Department of Homeland Security.
But this was especially true for Windsor significant Arab Canadian population.
Yet for the vast majority of Windsorites, you would always have access to the shopping and entertainment of Detroit
already by late September 2001. Trumping walls could be patronized on them, and even in October Canadians could witness
hockey games and other sports events in Detroit.
In October 2018, Detroit based entrepreneur Dan Gilbert announced that his quicken loans online mortgage company was expanding
to a previously empty building in downtown Windsor.
Gilbert had recently failed to land the new Amazon headquarters as a cross border Detroit winter venture.
Since 2010, Gilbert's companies have already redeveloped as many as 100 downtown buildings in Detroit bringing a pool of
tech savvy workers to the heart of the city.
In 2018, as the future of North American trade agreements looked grim, he could see the advantage of tapping into the talent pool of
Southwestern Ontario's rich university and technology sectors without the necessity for all the workers to actually cross the border
physically. 'One Campus Two Countries' was the slogan use for the Amazon pitch.
The invisible barrier that divides Windsor from Detroit under COVID-19 is now amazingly vastly thicker for the time being
more life changing than even 9/11.
Windsor is a house in lockdown where only those who have jobs in Detroit may cross the border and almost no one else.
Statistics for June 2020 indicated that they were 112,000 car crossings at the bridge which was 70% lower than a year previous.
The tunnels saw 53,000 cars at the climb of 85%. At the same time as an indicator that international trade continues to flow right
past Windsor and Detroit, truck crossings on the bridge were down a mere 9% for the same months.
The massive cross border flow to take advantage of sports teams, restaurant and bar culture, and of course cross border shopping,
had come to a standstill.
On the one hand, those living in Scarborough and Toronto have not been able to travel into the city to watch sports or live music
either and shopping in restaurants (inaudible).
- And a total ban on travel to your neighboring major city is quite a different venture, as Windsor in many ways, relies on Detroits ammenities.
And this difference will only become more accute Ontario attempts to slowly open up shopping and entertainment for the border
is expected to remain iron tight to the end of 2021 at least.
An important caveat here, however, is the significant daily workforce that travels from Windsor to greater Detroit - some 6000
Windsorites mainly working in the healthcare sector. These people maintain the connection to Detroit and surely conduct some shopping
for family or friends (inaudible)
some normalcy returned shortly after 9/11, the border was permanently securitized and changed.
While cross-border cultural life is deeply interconnected it is better to note that the governance structures of these two cities
exist in an almost entirely separate ground.
Both cities have launched city government as well as independent open data resources, such as windows open data portal
and the nonprofit data driven Detroit organization.
But they are strangely disconnected. Despite broad recognition of the deeply interdependent factors of cross border labor,
consumption patterns, health, agriculture and food industries, transportation networks, and international international property speculation.
Data driven and smart city initiatives that increasingly recognized the need for coordinated cross border information sharing,
or rather sponsored by groups such as the Ontario local employment planning council, workforce Windsor-Essex, or the University of
Windsors cross border Institute.
But, as you can see, for example, from data driven Detroit's research project Detroit website,
there is little to no information from Windsors adjacent communities and neighbourhoods, even though so many essential service
workers, including healthcare workers and truck drivers cross daily between these jurisdictions.
Interestingly, each city has independently commissioned the for profit company MyoVision, based in Kitchener, Ontario
to develop smart traffic intersections and traffic flow analyses leading to the Windsor-Detroit central border crossings.
Windsor embarked on a project with MyoVision to better coordinate traffic flow ion Huron Church road,
the current main artery that brings trucks from highway 401 to the Ambassador Bridge, and which is notoriously one of the
biggest bottlenecks in cross border trade.
On the Detroit side, MyoVision has revisioned its original proposal to develop smart traffic intersections in order to help Detroit
understand the traffic network technology as a means to monitor COVID-19 response efforts.
However these are completely separate projects and there's no indication that either of them have any kind of coordinated
information sharing of any sort.
So let me conclude by saying that I think at the metaphorical level McLuhan's wide ranging notion of the borderline condition
perhaps operates most effectively for the borderline in his hands, it's not simply a space of ever increasing harmony.
Indeed, he does not deny that cultures collide or the border spaces can be divisive, confrontational, or violent.
MICHAEL DARROCH: On the contrary, the image of his global village, of course, is optimistic about renewed forms of dialogism
and open engine informational flows.
But it is not simply a utopian sphere, anticipating a culturally harmonious landscape, rather it is a sphere in which we are
increasingly involved with each other, whether we like it or not.
And through their capacity to cause mutual irritation, borders continue to be collective spaces in which cultural differences must be acknowledged.
When during Detroit's long history of mutual surveillance in recent get separate ventures into open data and smart city technologies
in trench I think a missed opportunity to recognize these deeply felt forms of code cultural intrapenetration that characterize each city.
And I'll end there, thank you.
PAULA GARDNER: Thank you, Michael.
It's a very interesting narrative forming here around how efficient data capture systems can be when they serve existing
power structures. Well I'm interested to move on now to the presentation by Blayne Haggart. On to you Blayne.
Okay, thank you very much and as I begin here, I should just probably say that
while York University is a fine institution, I'm actually based down the road in the other direction at Brock, so
yeah. So we're into the home stretch here I'm happy to be here. My presentation is based on a chapter that I wrote for the edited
volume Smart Cities in Canada: Digital Dreams, Corporate Designs, which is edited by Mariana Valverde and Alexandra Flynn,
and you should all buy a copy of it and, of course, read it. And in the chapter, I talked about the marketing of Toronto's
Quayside project and what it can tell us about smart cities in general.
Largely because, really marketing was all of this project had. Sidewalk Labs, which is the company behind Quayside project
had a plan for what they wanted to do, but they were very reluctant to share those plans with the public, so instead of dealing
with the substantive issues and presenting a substantive plan, they gave Toronto effectively a two year marketing campaign.
So the first thing to understand when we're talking about smart cities and I'm sure, alot of this is
familiar to all of you, or to a lot of you, but it's always good for us to be on the same page. So the first thing to understand is that the phrase
'smart cities' is more of a marketing gimmick than anything else.
IBM trademarked the phrase 'smarter cities' in 2011, for example, and like any marketing gimmick, it is selling a few things.
It's selling the idea that a certain type of development, one based on
digital and network technologies and data driven processes, should be our preferred form of urban development.
In a way, smart city is designed to sell us the future.
It's a floating signifier much the same way that water often is.
And what it's giving us, what it's giving politicians is that thing that they all want to claim is that you know that when you're doing this
you're basically doing modern development, you're grabbing the future, you know, who doesn't want to be smart.
But it's also selling the idea that digital companies and tech companies are the ones that can deliver this form of
development, this smart city.
It's designed not only to sell, for instance, the hardware that connected city, but also the services, the standards that it
hopes will be the outcome, the nervous system of the city in the future.
So that's a pretty nice profit line and consistent profit line or revenue line if you can actually get it.
And it's concerning because, of course, if you can set the standards, then you can shape the future development and direction of
the city and become indispensable to running it. Again a nice gig if you can get it.
Now that said, when we're talking about smart cities, we're usually end up talking about things like they said network,
digital infrastructure, data collection, things like that, and these issues naturally give rise to certain policy questions such as:
who's going to collect the data, how's it going to be used, who's going to make the decisions around these issues and so on and so forth.
And also, in the particular case of Quayside, of the Quayside project, it was pitched as an urban tech laboratory
so there was an added question of who's going to control the intellectual property produced in this project.
So before going further, let's get a bit of background. So first there's the land. Quayside is a horrifically ugly,
12 acre piece of land on Toronto's undeveloped 800 acre Eastern waterfront.
Now a tried governmental arm's length agency called Waterfront Toronto, is responsible for developing what is probably
the most valuable undeveloped urban space in North America.
Now, while it's responsible for developing the area, it only directly owns and controls part of it, including a large bit of Quayside.
And it was under pressure at the time that all this was happening
because its mandate was expiring in a few years and it had relatively little to show for its efforts, economically speaking.
So in March 2017, it publishes a request for proposals, or RFP, for an innovation and development partner to help co develop
a Qauyside, so enter Sidewalk Labs.
Sidewalk Labs is a Google company, it was created in 2015 to get in on the burgeoning smart city market.
Now the key thing here is that the contract or the RFP was not to build a smart city, but to come up with a plan
to develop a smart city project. And the winning bid itself was all very flashy, basically promising the moon. In short,
they promised a turn of the ugliness on the left of your screen into the utopian paradise, the water coloured
utopian paradise on the right of your screen.
And key to this proposal was the idea of building a city from the Internet up, which was the company's de facto slogan
up until it started to give them political headaches a bit into the actual project.
And the slogan itself based a lot of sense given Google's competitive advantage that everybody knows about and here you can
kind of see the particular idea of development at play, it's one based on always on, always connecting, always watching
system delivering data driven products and services.
And this raises, as I suggested before, a lot of issues, a whole slew of issues around data governance, surveillance, privacy,
and intellectual property rights and these questions only grew as the project continued,
even as Sidewalk Labs effectively abandoned this slogan and tried to focus people's attention more on the physical infrastructure,
rather than the digital. You can maybe perhaps appreciate the irony of a Google company doing that.
So I call this a two year PR campaign, so why?
From the very beginning, there were loads of signs that they were not willing to engage in the substantive issues that I mentioned later on,
there's certain things that you need to discuss when you're talking about
a network infrastructure, you just have to deal with them. And starting from the initial town hall meeting in November 2017, they failed
consistently to substantively engage on nations of data collection surveillance and so on and so forth.
When they did, they had to be forced into doing so.
They were reluctant to talk about how data would be collected and used, and this is something that Natasha will talk about
in her presentation, so I will leave that to her.
They also ran an almost insultingly condescending consultation campaign and I'll just give you one example here
is that WaterfrontToronto and Sidewalk Labs tried to pass off as a form of consultation,
a preteen day camp. So again, you know, you can basically judge for yourself whether they're actually serious about consultations or not from that.
So this lack of engagement on the issues, lack of taking these things seriously this tells you that this is more PR than substance.
And then there was the piece de resistance, so if there was any doubt that Sidewalk Labs and Waterfront Toronto were basically
faking it until they could make it, they were dispelled
in June 2019, when Sidewalk Labs released its master innovation and development plan. So this is the thing effectively
that it was hired to co produce with Waterfront Toronto. Now, if you look at it here, it looks big,
it looks pretty, it looks substandard, it's 1500 pages long, it looks like a report, but this was a report designed to be seen from a distance
on a table or a bookshelf - it was not designed to be read.
For those of you who have not had the pleasure and honor of reading all 1500 pages, it's hard to convey exactly how empty this report actually is.
It's basically a collection of gee whiz ideas and watercolors portraying an ideal waterfront that never existed,
and I would argue, never actually will.
There are no practical plans in here. Their housing ideas, for example, would have required changing Toronto's bylaws to allow for
even tinier studio apartments. And I've lived in a Toronto studio apartment, the legal size is already miniscule.
Now the way you know that this is not a serious and real report is that real, serious reports have detailed plans.
They have basic things like tables of contents that are consistent, they have an index that people can refer to, this had nothing of the sort,
let alone, for instance, even hyperlinks in the online PDF version to let people be able to navigate it.
This from a company whose only claim to fame is that it understands the digital. So what this meant was that for all but the
most insane researcher, it's impossible to navigate, let alone for the for normal citizen.
We can also assess the documents lack of seriousness by the fact that
in the document it spent twice as much time, for instance, outlining its plans to outfit buildings with smart thermostats
as it did providing details about how it was going to install a revolutionary new power grid.
So basically, this was the 1500 page Snyder Cut of the original 2017 report.
Now, based on all of this we can glean some insights into the overall view of what the smart city is, there might not be substance there but
it does tell us something. So what does it tell us? Well it tells us that Sidewalk Labs' smart city is characterized above all by one thing,
Sidewalk Labs and Google approved tech and standards being at the heart of the city and its governance structure
in a way that would make Sidewalk Labs indispensable for Quayside and also future Sidewalk Labs based cities.
Now, there are a couple of problems with that, from a citizen in governance perspective. So first there's the locked in problem.
Quayside effectively would have been stuck with Google technology, which may not have been the best or the most appropriate
for whatever they wanted to do.
And this highlights one of Waterfront Toronto's greatest mistakes.
In the end they didn't sign up for a smart city, they signed up for a Google city, they signed up for a company town,
those two things are not necessarily equivalent.
Second, as the protecting consultations revealed, neither Sidewalk Labs nor Waterfront Toronto were really interested
in hearing what Torontonians actually wanted technology to do for them.
Instead, they just wanted to sell Torontonians on a suite of Google products. Now, this is top down planning at its absolute worst
in that it wasn't even tempered by democratic accountability.
Now third, beyond the public, the project was designed to sell government officials on the idea that Sidewalk Labs and Google,
companies with absolutely no track record in urban development, could be trusted with a nearly $40 billion urban development project.
And the only reason people thought that a search engine and online advertising company like Google could actually do urban development,
is because we've come to think of the companies that deal with digital data - they can do anything.
And so, this data isn't this belief that tech companies have some special insight into urban development or contact tracing
or what have you, it's a real problem in public policymaking, not just in a municipal development.
And finally, it's worth thinking about what the fact that this campaign was all style no substance tells us about the concept
of the smart city as a desirable form of urban development.
Specifically, it highlights how surveillance and data collection lie at the heart of smart city proposals.
And if you can't talk honestly about that, then the only thing you can fall back on is obfuscation and marketing.
And this is how we end up with a marketing campaign, rather than an actual plan.
But the question for me of what a smart city is, is also the question that Waterfront Toronto couldn't answer because
they didn't understand the privacy, data, and intellectual property issues that Sidewalk Labs' version of a smart city implied.
Instead, as is clear from the original March 2017 request for proposals, they thought the smart city was just another neutral type
of development, like an innovative construction material.
And this for me is really the lesson from the Quayside project, so it's not that Sidewalk Labs, this evil American company,
tried to pull a fast one over on the good people in Toronto,
rather it's a Waterfront Toronto and leaders from the Prime Minister on down to Mayor John Tory were so easily duped by this pitch,
and how vulnerable we all are to utopian promises when dressed up in the language of data, apps, artificial intelligence and technology.
And I will leave it there, thank you.
PAULA GARDNER: Thank you Blayne.
and I apologize if I got your university wrong. I knew, you were at Brock, did I say York?
BLAYNE HAGGART: I think so but that's okay. I often get them confused too.
PAULA GARDNER: Okay, and finally, on to Natasha and kudos to this panel, who is all keeping to times so beautifully.
NATASHA TUSIKOV: Alright, thanks everyone for coming to the panel, thanks for such great presentations.
My presentation started when Sidewalk Labs started announcing its data plans. As Blayne says, this was belatedly,
they were really pushed into this by activists and critics. And in this chapter that was published in Smart Cities in Canada,
I look at smart city data governance from the critical data studies literature,
and it involved analyzing all of Sidewalk Labs' proposals, including its massive 1500 page master plan.
Sidewalk Labs withdrew from Toronto, killed the project in May 2020, but I argue it's still important to think about
this project, to think about the proposals,
because it helps us understand Smart Cities, and it helps us understand you know what policies should go forward
and what policies should be scrapped. It provides lessons for policy makers in terms of how data should be collected,
how it should be stored and who should make these rules governing data.
So, as the entry point into thinking about this, I wanted to explore why Sidewalk Labs created its own signage system
for data collection and use, and why it decided physical signs in publicly accessible spaces was a useful even a necessary practice.
So, in Toronto, as it shows here, this is what Sidewalk Labs came up with in cooperation with several civil society groups.
Sidewalk Labs created this system of signage to essentially tell passers by what sensors embedded in urban infrastructure we're actually collecting.
Here you can see, it's a series of hexagons - one would indicate the technologies purpose, another the entity responsible,
the company or government department responsible. The third a QR code for those who are interested could scan that QR code and learn more.
And a final hexagon for privacy. So theoretically people would see these symbols posted on signs in the urban environment,
and they would be able to tell at a glance what entity was collecting what data and why.
Now rules managing the collection and data of use in Smart Cities are really important because Smart Cities operate through surveillances
the presentations here today have talked about. And what we have in smart cities is in sensors embedded into all manner of urban infrastructure
and things in the environment. So we have trash cans that can alert maintenance workers when they're full we have buses
that can alert mechanics when they need parts, we have cameras and sensors at intersections that can detect vehicles, bikes, and pedestrians.
So the purpose of smart cities is this real time data collection, data streaming, and data analysis in order to deliver services
like transit, like waste management.
So to operate them as they're designed by companies like Sidewalk Labs, Smart Cities need these continual flow of data.
And data is this fundamental building block. What this means, then, is it's incredibly important who sets the rules
regarding data collection, data use and who decides how those rules will apply. Sidewalk Labs, of course, wanted to put itself in the position
of setting some of these rules and it wanted to create signs to alert people as to data collection activities that are happening
in the urban environment. And this is because the Sidewalk Labs wanted to collect personal data, not just non personal data put into pollution,
information or the number of vehicles crossing a certain street, but they wanted to collect personal data, so this refers to identifiable person.
And it requires informed consent by people, this means that people have to consent understand what they're consenting to
what type of personal data is being collected, and generally people have to be given the option to decline the collection of data.
We often think of informed consent in relation to the collection of digital data in regards to apps, so clicking 'I Accept'
before you sign up to something or before you, you use some kind of service.
But collecting - obtaining consent in physical spaces is more difficult because there isn't an 'I accept'
click as you walk into a space. Now, Sidewalk Lab admitted that the collection of personal data in spaces was difficult saying
quote 'it's hard to get individual consent and publicly accessible spaces'.
And what Sidewalk Labs really argued was that putting signs in publicly accessible spaces, would be the equivalent of obtaining informed
consent from people. So simply your presence in a place where data collection was occurring, your continued presence, would signal your assent.
I argue that this is deeply problematic. The mere presence of signage in public spaces doesn't guarantee that people see
the signs, it doesn't guarantee that people understand all of these arcane symbols listed here, some sensors are very difficult
to see, they are embedded in urban infrastructure, they're difficult for the average person to spot ,they're very tiny.
These symbols are pretty new, they're unfamiliar to most people, it would be very difficult to learn a couple dozen
symbols and to memorize their arrangement and be able to notice them as you move through urban spaces.
As well, given the ubiquity of sensors in smart city spaces, the only choice for people would be to avoid certain neighbourhoods,
or to avoid certain services like transit and it's very difficult to opt out of essential services like transit.
So this isn't really a choice. Your choice is either accept surveillance in a smart city neighbourhood or, consider that neighbourhood off limits.
And it's not really consent when people are unable to opt out of public transit or unable to opt out of going into an area for work.
Now, Sidewalk Labs acknowledged that this was problematic, that this was controversial. An executive said quote
"no one's going to be forced to live in or visit this neighbourhood" so, in other words, according to Sidewalk Labs
if you enter a smart city neighbourhood expect to be monitored.
Now the broader problem here is that Sidewalk Labs is really proposing goals. Proposing goals through signage to govern
the collection and use of data. So Sidewalk Labs itself here was positioning itself as a policy maker.
Now why did Sidewalk Labs, the technology vendor position itself as a policy maker, the problem is, it was required to do so
on behalf of the smart city bidding process. So the government agency - the quasi government agency - involved
Waterfront Toronto, as Blayne said, set the terms of the request for proposal.
And Sidewalk Labs was meeting those terms when it agreed, yes, it would help co create the framework, the guidelines,
the rules that would govern the collection of data and privacy for this area.
This is very unusual, of course, traditional infrastructure projects, like bridges, we have a public agency setting the rules
and we have a private vendor building the bridge.
Here, what we have is the unusual requirement that the technology bidder, the vendor, Sidewalk Labs would actually enter the
policy making process and help set the rules itself.
Now sidewalk labs was a willing, even a very enthusiastic participant in setting the rules on data, and this is because Sidewalk Labs'
signage plan was always about more than setting data policies in Toronto.
The intent was to shape data policymaking and governance to benefit Google's commercial interests writ large, on the large scale collection
and commodification and use of data, as Blayne said, Google is a data company, it makes its money by amassing, by analyzing data.
And Sidewalk Labs' data signage practices were attempting to normalize this corporate data collection, so
in a Sidewalk Labs Smart City, there would be no surveillance free zones.
Every public or publicly accessible area would be a spot where all types of non personal data and personal data
would be siphoned up. The broader goal here of this proposal of data signage was to institute standards
on data governance that Sidewalk Labs/Google would be setting rules
as to how the data would be collected, how it would be stored, how it would be monetized ,who would own it.
And Toronto would be a test case a test case for rules governing data and it would serve as a model that Google would then export
export to other smart city practices, smart city industry settings around the world.
Now, what does Toronto's experience with a failed smart city did tell us about smart cities, well,
it should raise some classic questions about the division of authority between public and private actors,
so, in other words, who governs or who should govern and this is something we really have to think about and
I argued that there is a role ,and definitely expanded role for governments in setting the rules, especially regarding data and smart cities
governments have this role, should have this role in setting policies and rules independently from the tech vendors, that they are working with.
And governments have a role for the necessary oversight and ideally protecting and representing the public interest.
Currently we don't see this.
Certainly, that was very problematic during the Quayside project that, ideally, this is what we should be working towards.
Secondly, we need to step back and think about data collection, should some data even be collected in the first place?
Is there any type of data that we consider off limits, whether for governments to collect or for private companies to collect,
facial recognition data is certainly one of those types of data that many people are arguing should be off limits for various actors to collect.
How do we balance principles of privacy and data protection, with innovation there's a lot of discussion during the Quayside project
about innovation, job creation. But there are other elements we need to think about - other values we need to prioritize.
Certainly need to make sure that Smart Cities are spaces of fairness, of justice, of equality and that discussion was not as central in the
Toronto smart city case as it as it should have been. And finally, we need to think about what data governance framework work best for Canada.
Do we want the storage of data, especially personal data in Canada? If it can't be stored in Canada does that affect what
types of data we think should be collected?
So, you can read my chapter on the bit that I based the presentation on in this book Smart Cities in Canada, the same book that Blayne has his
chapter in or we could also send copies to people of the chapters if people are interested, and thanks.
PAULA GARDNER: Wonderful, thank you Natasha.
PAULA GARDNER: Wonderful, thank you everyone, and thank you so much for keeping to the time because it gives us
a lot of time, well about 20 minutes for conversation. So I'll remind people here who are in the audience that they're welcome
to pop questions into the chat and while you're doing that I'm thinking about a couple of nodes of overlap across the papers that that I've
seen during the presentations. And one is that data capture can be extremely efficient and effective when it's serving the needs of the state
or the corporation and can be less effective and responsive when it's serving the needs of - serving civic needs.
And when we think about civic needs we're also thinking about sustainable development, of course, and I'm thinking about
well, a lot of you work with that kind of premise, especially I'm thinking about that's work and a report by Beth and some colleagues reflecting on
Sidewalk it was, I think, a couple of years old. I want to talk about that. I'm also thinking about - I've been really provoked to think about what it means
to resist, given some of the scenarios that you've set up for us right so Cynthia's demonstrated that you know if you want to cross
the border and work, you know, into Israel and Palestine you've got to submit to this very extensive monitoring of your movement,
your messages and the photos that you're taking, as I recall, from your paper Kuan-Yun. And I'm thinking about what Beth was talking about
in terms of what does resistance look like if you're thinking of sort of that rigorous feminist manifesto of the right to resist
and then Natasha what you were just laying out right in terms of a smart city that's getting you
You know, images and signage that's so unfamiliar that you know were that to become instantiated you know how does one,
how does one resist. And then you know Blayne and Michael as well that question to you. So those are thoughts.
If people don't have a question, yet I I actually would like to ask that, as a question, I think that you know,
I always like to think about the future, when we're thinking about, sort of, these smart cities that are trying to imagine the future,
and if you were going to be designing something like Sidewalk, God help us.
Or you know, a really sustainable cross border region right that Michaels talking about between Windsor and Detroit
that was sustainable, you know.
For many, many, many decades, what would what would those city spaces look like if they were going to be smart and serve the civic
and allow for personal negotiation of what data gets released. So that's kind of a big question, you might want to answer it in terms
of the local site that you're thinking about.
Anybody can just raise their hand if they want to take that first. Natasha.
Yeah and that's a really interesting way to start, I think one of the lessons Quayside teaches us is that we were always
responding to Sidewalk Labs proposal. Sidewalk Labs threw out so many images and ideas and documents and half baked you know, policy proposals,
and it was exhausting to simply respond to that or simply understand it, and part of what sidewalk labs taught us is
that's a really good way of controlling the narrative, we were always then responding
in terms of how Sidewalk Labs was conceiving of data or privacy or smart cities or surveillance, instead of saying:
What do people in Toronto want? And there's lots of surveys of what people in Toronto want of affordable housing and better transit
and and all of these things, but instead of building from those proposals and then say how, if at all,
does technology get us there. We let the corporation control the narrative, so I'd say that one of the classic elements that we should do is
is bottom up actual civic needs, urban needs of the people and then decide where is technology even needed
in some cases it's probably not needed. There were insane
ideas that Sidewalk Labs proposed that would fit no one's absolute need. So where is technology needed rather than assuming technology is the answer.
PAULA GARDNER: Yeah, Blayne.
BLAYNE HAGGART: Yes, thank you for the questions. I think you know building off of with Natasha said, I think I'll also push back a little bit
against the idea that there's a necessary conflict between civic needs and state needs,
I think that Kuan-Yun, you know, her presentation, for instance, points out, whether it's definite conflict right. But, you know, for -
But the problem there is, there's a definite problem with the way the state is acting.
I think the way to approach the issue like if you're decide in the future what would you do, the big problem
with Sidewalk Labs thing is this lack of - well there's two things, first of all there's a lack of understanding
among government officials about what they were signing up for, but then there's also this lack of democratic accountability.
This lack of the bottom up generation of ideas and that's the real problem, because at the end of the day
I think it's important to keep in mind that in terms of getting things done, like it's we can't just say like we throw this out to civil society
to do things. Civil society only works through basically government. That's basically the, you know, that the relationship is between state and civil society.
So what's important is that there is democratic accountability for these collective actions. And I think, also an important thing too
is, in addition to this bottom up, need start with like talking to people on the ground, like I said they already do this a lot in Toronto,
and find out what they actually want - go from there. But the other thing too, is not to get kind of dazzled by all this
by technology and data or anything like this and
focus on what are the best possible solutions to a problem as opposed to what is the best possible technological solution to a problem.
BETH COLEMAN: Yes, I mean, I agree, and we can look at cities like Barcelona and other places that have been very people driven,
civic centric, and designing around participation.
But, we still have a problem that seems to go across all of the installations of these types of smart tech,
in terms of the nature of what the technology does, and one of the reasons why I'm fascinated with the quotidian use of this stuff the
totally normal and boring application I can't straight is because it's the opposite of Sidewalk Labs, nobody's paying attention,
nobody really cares, there's not volumes written about this.
But unfortunately what we're seeing is the same problems manifest, but in some ways I don't want to say it's better or worse,
like we've got a lot of bad scenarios at our fingertips.
But because nobody cares and it's being - it is authorized by the city of Toronto, we've got Council people who voted for this
we've got civil servants who put this operation into place.
There has been some aspect of public consultation, but it's similar to long histories of public consultation, where tiny group of people show up,
Because there's no drama here, we don't get blocked sidewalk we don't get the kind of activists amplification and what we have in effect is
the application of surveillance technologies, without even weird design-y signage, and I mean I laughing at Natasha's
mockery of it, and rightly so, but like we don't even have that, we just have literally a tangle of wires above the street car,
so this idea, and the other reason why I'm looking at New York and some other sites is, cities are choosing for various reasons, to
put in these arrays and none of them have really demonstrated
the kinds of things that we're talking about in terms of what does consent really mean, how is this data handled, what's being taken up?
Like how does the city know if it's a bicycle or person or car, they have to be able to discern, otherwise the data doesn't mean anything
to them, but we can't see that, when they publish the data so we're like so what the heck is happening here?
So part of what I'm - part of what I'm - The next step, trying to work on is what does it mean to model trust and not
only trying to model privacy or consent, so.
I loved Mike's bridges, I was like oh let's go back to bridges.
MICHAEL DARROCH: I mean, like the case of Windsor-Detroit is kind of unusual, it's one of the biggest cross border environments in the world.
But I mean it's impossible, it's almost impossible to find
any form of information sharing that filters down to a public level that really has any meaningful data to think about sustainability,
but also about you know, health and welfare, for example, so I mean all this information about coronavirus needs in one city,
the other is completely disconnected.
We don't have any way of knowing, although we know the data is collected somewhere, you know, see border security in both sides,
but we don't really know, for example,
where essential workers are moving through the border into hotspots, for example, right and it's, we know that there's serious transmission
of the virus going in this in these directions, but we can't actually -
you know, as as kind of civic participants, think about that in any concrete way, so it's kind of astonishing how little information sharing,
there is at a civic level between the two cities.
PAULA GARDNER: That was fascinating, what you presented Michael, astonishing. Cynthia did you want to respond to the question?
The one that you asked or Sara?
PAULA GARDNER: Whatever with the conversation here, can respond to that. CYNTHIA : Okay.
CYNTHIA KUANYUN WANG: Yeah so,
PAULA GARDNER: Sara asked a question, yeah.
CYNTHIA KUANYUN WANG: Yeah, so that that's why I was a bit confused, yeah. So I think for the case that I was studying in Israel and Palestine
for like the data governments and the rights to data,
I think, for the case, there is a little bit different and tricky because it's happening to like the security of a nation,
and also it's happening to occupation, and certainly the colonialism that's happening there, so I think for data governments it's always
a bit tricky to speak of like how and who can store it but certainly, I think, a very important step is to
give authority back to Palestinians, because I think some of other presentations also mentioned that
for the smart city and the Sidewalk Lab, there's just no choice, like you cannot avoid going to a place if you want to
take transit, for example, and so there's just no other options in all our shared conversation, but I think that's something that's really
deeply problematic because how can we give people back their rights to decide if
they want to access here without being - like sacrifice your own personal data.
And I also want to like tap into a little bit about Sara's question about the training models, because I think that like they're collecting
the status for building up a pattern or a training models for several different levels of purposes, because, for one, they say it's for security
purposes, so they have a lot of spyware that's being developed and also they say this is for - it can be used for business purposes.
But then when we look at, for example in Angela Davis' books, she clarity, points out, for example, the
connection between the US police department and the Israeli army.
Like, she offered that example of, for example, the police officer who shot Michael Brown in Ferguson, Darren Wilson,
he and other officers who guarded Missouri are actually training in Israel. So these are some of the very
alarming examples that I think when we think about how they are building some of the models
and then relay that back to the bigger context of global terrorism, that's what I feel more deeply troubling.
Now, I hope that answer a little bit about the question.
PAULA GARDNER: He's nodding, yes, thank you, that was an interesting one. We've got well there's a great
conversation going on in the chat for whoever's missing it.
But we've got a question from Brenna who's asking how might ideas like data trust connect to the future of a smart slash monitored city development?
Data trust and the future of smart monitored city development.
PAULA GARDNER: Natasha do you want to talk about because you gave an answer, though.
NATASHA TUSIKOV: Yeah, so data trust have some potential they're still very new. Sidewalk Labs for those who
didn't follow every twist and turn in that saga, certainly sidewalk labs did propose to ideas of data trusts.
The challenge there was that they were really positioning themselves as the center, the designer of the trust, the benefitor
of the trust and they really, unsurprisingly,
had this conception of a data trust that would benefit its commercial interests in terms of data would be - all data that was publicly available would be
kind of slid into this trust and actors could use that data is they wished. I think, before we get to
a point where we debate the merits of the setup of a data trust or who should benefit or how it should be run,
to think about those basic elements that I was talking about of do we think some data should even not be collected.
Are we happy with private actors, for example, collecting and commodifying and monetizing personal information.
How do people feel about that? Surveys, such as the one that Sara Bannerman and Angela Ora show.
People are very uneasy about the collection of personal data in smart city, so these should be some of the questions that we think about.
What type of data should be collected before we get to the where/how it should be governed, in what model of governance, it should be
should be undertaken, but data trust I definitely think are
something that should be in the mix, we should be talking about them, but we shouldn't be kind of just taking corporate models that
are already being flushed out by companies, we should do a lot more work before we get there.
PAULA GARDNER: Yeah Blayne.
BLAYNE HAGGART: Yeah I think that the key thing here is that
you know, what I see this conversation about data trust it always seem to come back to this idea that you know how do we get
data away from companies and governments and how do we make some kind of pure
you know, pure decisions about these things that reflect the will the people. And the reality, sad or otherwise,
is that you can't get away from questions of power. Somebody's going to be making these decisions at some point.
And so the question is always going to be who's going to make them in whose interests.
And again, this is where I always come back to the importance of having kind of like a well informed
democratically elected government and good policies in place, because in essence we have a lot of we're seeming to reinvent the wheel.
I don't know about you guys, but I just filled out the census yesterday, and that is like you know
completely invasive data collection thing, but nobody has a problem with that, because it's embedded in certain processes and so on and so forth.
So we're not reinventing the wheel here, this is not something that magical and new, and there are basic principles that we can
appeal to and coming back to like what Beth was saying, with respect to-
with how governments are dealing with these things, and then in the super crappy
procedures that gets you they kind of like all those tangled wires on telephone poles.
And I think a lot of it is that comes down to a big issue is not only kind of like weak democratic accountability
within municipalities and the province and federal government,
but also the credulity that we see in officials whenever something technological comes down the pipeline.
And this is an enormous problem.
Is that it's just - it's basically - it's like the model rail episode from the Simpsons, where someone from out of town comes and says
Oh, we got this big shiny idea and everyone just loses their mind, and this is still happening today.
So that kind of lack of capacity in government is an enormous problem and it's triply enormous at the municipal level where they
lack a lot of capacity to do pretty much anything that we need cities to do. So that's that's a huge huge challenge.
PAULA GARDNER: We have two minutes left if others want to jump in and have a closing word on this, or another thought.
Beth.
BETH COLEMAN: I just wanted to ask if, I don't know exactly the language but knowledge mobilization? I mean
I'm using trust as a word there, but what are people thinking in terms of the heavy load that folks have to take on,
or what seems like a heavy load of, how do we understand what's going on?
BETH COLEMAN: We I mean -
Some some people had to figure out how to get vaccinated and that wasn't easy and that was being served to us. So are people thinking more public
knowledge mobilization? Like how where are we going on this?
BLAYNE HAGGART: So you're asking about like what way do we frame the concept of data or you're asking, but how do we educate people about this.
BETH COLEMAN: How do we educate people, so they can be participants, because I do think that one of
I mean we didn't really talk about this so much, but one of the findings around
this kind of - these kinds of questions and perils are greater civic participation. When neighbourhoods and
land trust groups really take it up and start to advocate for themselves, and you know build that energy up in a city.
BLAYNE HAGGART: Well, I know that, like, for instance Natasha and I had been writing on like, for instance, covering
capacity on these issues because we're basically you know almost 40 years in hollowing out of government and not
able to deal with, with a lot of stuff.
And part of it is just you know kind of like straightforward, I think like kinda like civic engagement is important, but I also think it's important
to engage with decision makers and the people who are actually working, not just on say, data issues but on every - like,
if you're a municipal employee now you have to understand data and intellectual property. That's -
And these are things that scare intellectual property lawyer - or non intellectual property lawyers.
It's causing huge changes to the economy, so a lot of it is just kind of like straight up education and just kind of like you know
continuing to try to engage with as many people and telling them here's how this new stuff works, but also not losing you know,
track of the idea that you know that this doesn't completely reinvent the world, democratic accountability
is still important, and data, it doesn't solve everything.
PAULA GARDNER: Michael do you have final word on this?
MICHAEL DARROCH: I'm just gonna say I think Blayne's comment that the census, you know, is a good example of a long standing
tradition of big data collection that it goes back you know, well over a century in Canadian context.
And when we saw the Harper government tried to cancel the census, there was an outcry, where you know people from all kinds
of different jurisdictions were able to articulate very clearly why this data is useful, why it's collected, how it benefits people
in different places, right, and it led to the reevaluation/reinstitution of the census, so I think that that kind of process
and policies is really strong and that's maybe a good thought, a good point to end on.
PAULA GARDNER: It's a good point to end on. I want to thank all the panelists for their excellent preparation and
really interesting presentations and engagement and I'm going to do one more round of applause
with applause from the field. And I encourage you to read their bios and follow the breadcrumbs to their writing because
it's very inspired and you will learn a lot. So thanks everyone and we'll see you at the next panel.
Sara Bannerman (Conference Team)(she/her): Thank you all for your terrific presentations.
Sara Bannerman (Conference Team)(she/her): And thank you Paula for chairing.
PAULA GARDNER: Pleasure, yeah.