Just over a year ago, the prime minister, Ontario’s then-premier and the mayor gathered on Toronto’s waterfront to announce with much fanfare that a Google company was coming to town with a vision for the data-driven neighbourhood of the future. It was handshakes and smiles all round.

That was, of course, before the Facebook/Cambridge Analytica scandal, which crystallized for many people how valuable personal data can be, and just how easily it can fall into the wrong hands and be misused. It must be hard now for Sidewalk Labs CEO Daniel Doctoroff to remember those heady days when his idea was viewed as a project of innovation instead of a privacy disaster waiting to happen. The project has certainly had a tough go lately.

There have been several high-profile exits, including a developer on the Waterfront Toronto board, members of the digital strategy panel and a renowned privacy expert.

And, most recently, Ontario’s Auditor General Bonnie Lysyk weighed in with another round of critiques. She raised questions about how the deal with the Manhattan-based Sidewalk Labs came together and suggested more oversight of the federal-provincial-city waterfront development agency is needed.

That gave Premier Doug Ford, who has long has his own ideas for the city’s waterfront (see: Ferris wheel, casino, mega mall), an opening to remove the provincially appointed board members. And the government has vowed to take further “decisive action.” So, if Ford’s new board appointees don’t manage to scuttle the whole deal, this proposal for a smart-city neighbourhood at the foot of Parliament St. will face yet more scrutiny.

To some degree, that’s fair. Sidewalk Labs has mentioned everything from self-driving vehicles to public spaces that adapt to the weather. That would all be new for Toronto and, as such, it should expect to face more scrutiny than your average development proposal. And privacy concerns are legitimate, especially given that we’re living in a world where technology advances far faster than our legislators’ ability to write laws to properly protect people.

But some of these privacy fears have been blown well out of proportion to what’s actually happened so far, which is not much of anything, and it risks undermining the entire project before it can even get to the stage where it can be fairly judged.

A draft master plan is expected to be submitted to the waterfront agency and all three levels of government for review in January 2019. That’s the point where governments and ultimately citizens will get to see what’s really on offer. How data will be collected, what will be done with it and who will own it is just one piece of that. The other vital piece is finding out whether this project measures up to Doctoroff’s original promise: “Innovation mixed with really thoughtful design.”

While privacy concerns are taking the lion’s share of attention, the way the 12-acre Quayside site, roughly the size of Nathan Phillips Square, is designed and built will determine the quality of life for those who will live and work there.

To have real value, the development must be more than a techno-experiment, and Doctoroff has claimed the objective is to find ways to “address our biggest urban challenges.”

Can Sidewalk Labs deliver a livable, affordable and green neighbourhood of the future?

That’s something worth having a debate about, but it won’t be easy now. Sidewalk Labs has become a convenient punching bag for things that have little to do with this actual proposal. For privacy advocates, it’s a way to beat up on Google and by extension other technology giants. For the Ford government, it’s a way to beat up on Waterfront Toronto, the city and the Wynne government.

Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading...

And it does seem as though many people who know they should be more vigilant about their privacy than they are when it comes to all those apps on their cellphones have decided to dump all their pent-up privacy concerns on this one project.

It’s a shame because there are important conversations to be had about urban design and community building that are getting lost in the data debate.

Read more about: