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takyon writes:

Google CEO Larry Page has announced the launch of Sidewalk Labs, an urban living focused company that is similar in approach to the healthcare and anti-aging Google spinoff Calico:

Page says the new company will be "developing and incubating urban technologies to address issues like cost of living, efficient transportation, and energy usage." Sidewalk Labs will be run by Dan Doctoroff, former CEO of Bloomberg LP and the "Deputy Mayor of Economic Development and Rebuilding" for New York City.

There's a website up and running at sidewalkinc.com, which calls for a rethink of how we design cities. "By 2050, the population in cities will double, intensifying existing socioeconomic, public health and environmental problems. At the same time, innovations in technology can be used to design communities that are more efficient, responsive and resilient."

There's also a press release, that says Sidewalk Labs will work on "making transportation more efficient and lowering the cost of living, reducing energy usage and helping government operate more efficiently" and that it will "develop new products, platforms and partnerships to make progress in these areas." The press release calls out "ubiquitous connectivity and sharing, the internet of things, dynamic resource management and flexible buildings and infrastructure" as technologies it thinks can help with city life.

Sidewalk Labs seems to very closely follow the Calico model, Google's healthcare and anti-aging company: 1) find a leader in an up-and-coming-field (Sidewalk has Doctoroff, Calico has Art Levinson), 2) use Google's vast resources to start a spin-off company with said leader as CEO, and 3) have them work on moonshots. Like Calico, Sidewalk Labs is a separate company from Google and isn't part of Google[x] or any other division—we'd imagine Google has a large ownership stake in the new company, though.

takyon writes:

Google Is Building a City of the Future in Toronto. Would Anyone Want to Live There?

TORONTO—Even with a chilly mid-May breeze blowing off Lake Ontario, this city's western waterfront approaches idyllic. The lake laps up against the boardwalk, people sit in colorful Adirondack chairs and footfalls of pedestrians compete with the cry of gulls. But walk east, and the scene quickly changes. Cut off from gleaming downtown Toronto by the Gardiner Expressway, the city trails off into a dusty landscape of rock-strewn parking lots and heaps of construction materials. Toronto's eastern waterfront is bleak enough that Guillermo del Toro's gothic film The Shape of Water used it as a plausible stand-in for Baltimore circa 1962. Says Adam Vaughan, a former journalist who represents this district in Canada's Parliament, "It's this weird industrial land that's just been sitting there—acres and acres of it. And no one's really known what to do with it."

That was before Google.

This past October, a coalition of the Toronto, Ontario and Canadian governments contracted with Sidewalk Labs, a sister company of Google, to come up with a $50 million design for a dozen acres on the waterfront's far eastern end. The idea is to reimagine Toronto's derelict waterfront as "the world's first neighborhood built from the internet up," as Sidewalk describes it. The neighborhood, called Quayside, would leapfrog the usual slow walk of gentrification to build an entire zone, all at once, as a "smart city," a sensor-enabled, highly wired metropolis that can run itself.

Toronto's choice of the Google-affiliated firm immediately captured the attention of urban planners and city officials all over the world; magazine stories trumpeted "Google's Guinea-Pig City" and "A Smarter Smart City." Still in its early days, the partnership has left people curious but wary. Google? What does a tech company know about running a real live city?

In one sense, what's perhaps surprising is that it has taken this long. Silicon Valley's innovators have long had side obsessions with making the world a better place, driven largely by the confidence that their own brainpower and a near-total disregard for tradition can break old logjams. PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel helped seed the "seasteading" movement to create offshore libertarian paradises; the tech incubator YCombinator is currently running a public-policy experiment in Oakland, California, giving residents a guaranteed monthly stipend to see how it might improve their quality of life.

Original Submission

canopic jug writes:

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.

Original Submission

c0lo writes:

Trying to do without Google to see how hard it can be is a way to understand just how much Google's tentacles are intertwined in everyday's life

As part of an experiment to live without the tech giants, I'm cutting Google from my life both by abandoning its products and by preventing myself, technologically, from interacting with the company in any way.

Engineer Dhruv Mehrotra built a virtual private network, or VPN, for me that prevents my phone, computers, and smart devices from communicating with the 8,699,648 IP addresses controlled by Google... Because I'm blocking Google with Dhruv's VPN, I have to find replacements for all the useful services Google provides and without which my life would largely cease to function:

• I migrate my browser bookmarks over to Firefox (made by Mozilla).
• I change the default search engine on Firefox and my iPhone from Google—a privilege for which Google reportedly pays Apple up to $13 billion per year—to privacy-respecting DuckDuckGo, a search engine that also makes money off ads but doesn't keep track of users' searches.
• I download Apple Maps and the Mapquest app to my phone. I hear Apple Maps is better than it used to be, and damn, Mapquest still lives! I don't think I've used that since the 90s/a.k.a. the pre-smartphone age, back when I had to print directions for use in my car.
• I switch to Apple's calendar app.
• I create new email addresses on Protonmail and Riseup.net (for work and personal email, respectively) and direct people to them via autoreplies in Gmail. Lifehack: The easiest way to get to inbox zero is to start a brand new inbox.

...
This experiment is not just about boycotting Google products. I'm also preventing my devices from interacting with Google in invisible or background ways, and that makes for some big challenges.

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