An anonymous reader quotes a report from VentureBeat: Alphabet’s Sidewalk Labs plans to spin out some of its smart city ideas into separate companies, CEO Daniel Doctoroff said today at Collision from Home conference. Doctoroff listed three potential companies: mass timber construction, affordable electrification sans fossil fuels, and planning tools optimized with machine learning and computation design. Last month, Sidewalk Labs…
Tag: Sidewalk Labs
You Can’t Fight City Hall. But Maybe You Can Fight Google.
Faced with an array of opponents for its sensor-laden city of tomorrow in Toronto, a Google sibling has drastically dialed back plans. The critics now want the tech giant to quit altogether. From a report: The announcement was big enough for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to fly down to Toronto and deliver. A corporate sibling of Google had been selected to…
Toyota Will Transform a 175-Acre Site In Japan Into a ‘Prototype City of the Future’
At CES on Monday, Toyota CEO Akio Toyoda said the Japanese auto giant will transform a 175-acre site of a former car factory into a “prototype city of the future” where it can test autonomous vehicles, innovative street design, smart home technology, robotics, and new mobility products on real people who would live there full-time. The Verge reports: The site, which…
Google’s Sidewalk Labs Leaked Document Reveals Company’s Early Vision For Data Collection, Tax Powers, Criminal Justice
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Globe and Mail: A confidential Sidewalk Labs document from 2016 lays out the founding vision of the Google-affiliated development company, which included having the power to levy its own property taxes, track and predict people’s movements and control some public services. The document, which The Globe and Mail has seen, also describes how…
Canada Civil Liberties Group Argues Toronto Shouldn’t Be ‘Google’s Lab Rat’
“A civil liberties group in Canada is suing three tiers of government over potential privacy issues posed by Sidewalk Labs’s plan to develop a 12-acre smart city in Toronto, which will be approved or denied later this summer,” reports Fast Company. The fight centers around a taxpayer-funded organization jointly created by the federal, provincial, and municipal governments:
The Canadian Civil Liberties Association…
Canada Is Getting Sued Over Sidewalk Labs’ ‘Smart City’ In Toronto
The Google affiliate’s Quayside project has been hit by a massive legal challenge from the Canadian Civil Liberties Association targeting all three levels of government. Source: https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/gy4bgj/canada-is-getting-sued-over-sidewalk-labs-smart-city-in-toronto…