Discussions about so-called “smart cities” usually fall into two parts, the first being where people involved in managing cities get ever-so-excited about all the whizz-bang technology that will make providing services to cities so much better. And the second where those usually called “privacy campaigners” get ever-so-agitated about the private technology companies that will, we’re told, own all the data. The implication of all this is for us to worry greatly about what’s being wished for because, you know, we can’t trust those evil technology monopolists at Google or Facebook.
In a long article about Quayside in Toronto, Brian Barth beautifully encapsulates this debate. We begin with the launch of the smart city project as a partnership between the city and Google-parent company, Alphabet. A launch attended by Canada’s prime minster and a catalogue of government and business great-and-good from across North America.
The prime minister spoke in earnest tones. Quayside, as the 12-acre waterfront project had been christened, would be “a testbed for new technologies,” he said, “that will help us build smarter, greener, more inclusive cities.” Not one to shy away from wholesome platitudes, he added, “The future, just like this community, will be interconnected.”
Well, yes. But on whose terms? Is the interconnectedness down to Big Tech or a thing of government and municipal administration? Or maybe as a partnership between the two. The debate continues as we enter the critic phase. Before this happens, however, it’s worth noting that the Quayside project was just another grandiose government regeneration scheme. A huge property development project anchored by favourable planning regimes and government grants over which was washed a sort of ‘tech-magic’ courtesy of Sidewalk, a tech subsidiary of Bloomberg (the ultimate municipal authoritarians), and Alphabet.
As ever with such programmes the presumption was that what happened in London could be done in Toronto. A huge area of under-developed former industrial land near the city heart would be turned into a business wonderland – the tech-magic would act as a magnet to powerful business leaders who saw it as the future. The problem, of course, was that (as usual with such schemes) the proposal wasn’t grounded in business or economic reality but rather in the political desires of Canada’s leadership to get one over on the Yanks.
Which returns us to the critics.
In early 2018, Balsillie also began to speak out aggressively against the tech industry. Testifying in Ottawa at a hearing about the Cambridge Analytica scandal in May that year, he told members of a parliamentary committee that “Facebook and Google are companies built exclusively on the principle of mass surveillance.” The danger of partnering with foreign companies like Sidewalk Labs was that “our data is subject to foreign laws, making Canada a client state,” he’d said.
Leaving aside the presumption that it is beyond the wit of the Canadian parliament to legislate data protection rules, this approach dominates criticism of smart cities: that it’s the involvement of Big Tech that’s the problem rather than the wider civil liberties issues associated with surveillance. You get the impression from the likes of Balsillie (who used to own Blackberry, the mobile phone maker) that it would all be fine if the technology was controlled by the native government or a native business closely associated with that native government. It seems that it’s OK to be China but not OK to be the USA.
Ask yourself for a moment why it is smart cities that work through partnerships with technology companies are somehow worse than smart cities that use technology under the municipal government’s control? The same intrusion, the same surveillance, the same presumption that the point of city management is to control and direct people’s behaviour, yet one is acceptable while the other represents rapacious monopoly capitalism extracting “our data” for nefarious but unspecified evil purposes. The problem isn’t the data is it? The real problem is the surveillance and the assumptions those using it have about the residents of a place. And the core problem isn’t even being watched, it’s that those who don’t want to be watched do not get that option, the premise of the smart city is that by tracking people’s activity we get better (whatever that means) municipal services and a ‘safer’ city. There is no pretence of seeking individual agreement to the surveillance – at least the tech companies pretend to do this by getting us to tick a box saying we’ve read their terms and conditions, government does not feel obliged to do this when it plans surveillance in public places.
You didn’t agree to your local council filming you walking innocently down the high street. You didn’t agree to the local police force tracking and checking your vehicle registration as you went about your legitimate business. And you didn’t agree to your local council putting sensors in your rubbish bin to check what goes on there. There are a thousand examples of government’s collecting information about what you do without having the courtesy of asking your permission first. Government hides this behind the pretence of democracy – assuming that consent by half plus one of a parliament some how represents the consent of all the people.
The debate about smart cities needs to move on from simply a debate about the control of data and, instead, start to explore the idea of consent and the extent to which the fig leaf of democratic accountability (a very small, browning and curled fig leaf) is used to justify ever more authoritarian approaches to managing urban spaces. Too much of the criticism of urban space management focuses on the distinction between private and public and ignores the issue of individual consent. And not just consent to data use but consent to the panoply of intrusive urban management strategies used by councils, police, health services and central governments. When we set out data protection laws applicable to private business, we stress that people can opt out or opt in to letting the collector use their data. And this is when we have given the business the right to collect our data.
These options, in or out, are not given to citizens when the government (without first requesting permission) gathers data on our private activity. Perhaps the reason why those technology monopolies (they aren’t really monopolies of course but everyone who hates them says they are) like partnership with government is because is gets them round to controls that those governments apply to the private sector but not to the public sector.
….
No comments:
Post a Comment