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. The lawsuit aims to nullify the partnership that Sidewalk Labs, Google’s sibling company, has with the taxpayer-funded organization Waterfront Toronto . (Waterfront Toronto was created jointly by the federal, provincial, and municipal governments.) The Canadian Civil Liberties Association claims that Waterfront Toronto, let alone Sidewalk Labs, doesn’t have the jurisdiction to make rules about people’s privacy.

The government “sold out our constitutional rights to freedom from surveillance and sold it to the global surveillance mammoth of behavioral data collection: Google,” said Michael Bryant, the executive director and general counsel of the CCLA, in a press conference. The Canadian Civil Liberties Association joined with Toronto resident Lester Brown, who lives next to the Quayside neighborhood that Sidewalk Labs is proposing to develop, in suing the government. “Canada, Toronto, you are the lab rats in Google’s Sidewalk Lab,” Bryant said. “Our job at the Canadian Civil Liberties Association is to say to all three levels of government that Canadians should not be Google’s lab rat. This lab needs to be shut down and reset.”

Sidewalk Labs issued a statement, disputing the premise. “Sidewalk Labs is strongly committed to the protection and privacy of urban data,” the statement read. “In fact, we’ve been clear in our belief that decisions about the collection and use of urban data should be up to an independent data trust, which we are proposing for the Quayside project. This organization would be run by an independent third party in partnership with the government and ensure urban data is only used in ways that benefit the community, protect privacy, and spur innovation and investment. This independent body would have full oversight over Quayside. Sidewalk Labs fully supports a robust and healthy discussion regarding privacy, data ownership, and governance. But this debate must be rooted in fact, not fiction and fear-mongering.”

Longstanding concerns about privacy

Since the project’s inception, critics–including Jim Balsillie, the former co-CEO of Blackberry–have been raising the alarm about potential risks to people’s privacy. Ann Cavoukian, the former Information and Privacy Commissioner for the Canadian province of Ontario who joined the project early, quit in October 2018. The reason? Sidewalk Labs had decided not to require that all data collected by third parties in the development be instantly de-identified at the source, which would mean that sensitive data like people’s faces or license plates could still potentially be used for corporate profit. “I knew the smart city of privacy wasn’t going to happen,” she says. “That’s why I resigned: I said, I can’t go along with it.”

Not helping matters: Sidewalk Labs’s plans have been secretive, with little space for public comment (though the organization does regularly open its office to the public to garner feedback). “Citizens in the area don’t feel that they’ve been consulted appropriately,” Cavoukian says. “They feel they should sign off on some of these futuristic models that are emanating from Sidewalk Labs. So I think they’re going to get a lot of resistance.”

The resistance

This lawsuit is the first big step in that resistance, though the CCLA is choosing to target the government rather than Sidewalk Labs. Bryant’s argument is based on how Waterfront Toronto was formed. The organization was jointly created by the governments of Canada, Ontario, and the city of Toronto–but Bryant is arguing that the government never gave Waterfront Toronto the jurisdiction to decide what people’s privacy rights should be. That means that Waterfront Toronto does not have the authority to outsource people’s privacy rights to Sidewalk Labs, the suit alleges. Bryant compares the governments’ decision to the Boeing 737 plane crashes, which may have occurred in part because the Federal Aviation Administration asked Boeing to be in charge of its own safety certification.

“The problem is less that Google and its siblings want the lab in the first place, the problem is that Waterfront Toronto and our governments let this happen,” Bryant said. “…they [struck] a deal where they outsourced our privacy rights and the supervision of our privacy rights and our surveillance to the very company that’s doing the surveillance.”