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posted by chromas on Sunday October 07 2018, @03:41PM   Printer-friendly
from the privatize-the-public dept.

The Globe and Mail has an editorial about the many disadvantages of the upcoming Sidewalk Toronto surveillance project. If one sets aside the repeated conflation of copyright, patents, trademarks, and trade secrets under a single, misleading moniker, the editorial covers how much control over public resources and public spaces is being relinquished to private companies without transparency or accountability, especially in regards to surveillance data collected.

With politicians rushing to show Canada's innovation chops, "smart cities" have emerged as their new frontier. Most consequential of these is a high-profile agreement between Waterfront Toronto and Sidewalk Labs, a subsidiary of Google's parent company Alphabet. A year ago, Canadians were treated to an announcement involving the leaders of all three levels of government gushing and fawning about an enlightened urban partnership with a foreign company whose business model is built exclusively on the principle of mass surveillance.

The most insightful comments during the public announcement came when Eric Schmidt, Google's former executive chair, said they had realized their long-running dream for "someone to give us a city and put us in charge." He also thanked Canadian taxpayers for paying, creating and transferring the core artificial-intelligence technology he credits for Alphabet's success, making it the world's third most valuable corporation. The Google parent's past and future growth are based on the intellectual property (IP) they own and the data they control.


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 08 2018, @01:41PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 08 2018, @01:41PM (#745949)

    Beat me to it. The rolling out of these mass surveillance solutions is a long-term strategy on the part of the capitalist elites. They know that the proles will get restless when they're starving, and they think that maybe they'll be able to keep the masses under control and enslaved with the magic of technology. In the information age, slave shackles will be made of information. There is no need for iron shackles, because massa knows where you are and what you're thinking every minute of every day.

    And of course then there are the useful idiots who approve such things after receiving a keen sounding futurist gee-wiz "world of tomorrow, today!" sales pitch from the elites DBA the Five Eyes DBA Alphabet DBA Google.