Article content

Roger McNamee, an early investor in Apple, Facebook, and Google who has become a critic of these companies, has urged Toronto City Council to abandon the project with Alphabet’s Sidewalk Labs on the city’s waterfront.

Photo by Getty Images

We apologize, but this video has failed to load.

tap here to see other videos from our team. Try refreshing your browser, or Google critic Roger McNamee urges Toronto to abandon ‘surveillance capitalism’ project Sidewalk Labs Back to video

In a letter to the council executive committee Tuesday, June 4, McNamee, the author of Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe, said the smart city project is the most highly evolved version to date of “surveillance capitalism.”

He said Google will capture all manner of data in the proposed community and claim the right to exploit that data as it sees fit.

No matter what Google is offering, the value to Toronto cannot possibly approach the value your city is giving up Roger McNamee

See his full letter below:

Dear Members of the Executive Committee,

I am writing to ask that you abandon the project with Alphabet’s Sidewalk Labs on Toronto’s waterfront.

Since 1982, I have been a professional investor in the technology industry in the United States. Over my long career, I ran the top-performing tech mutual fund in America and co-founded three successful investment funds: Integral Capital Partners, Silver Lake Partners, and Elevation Partners. Integral was affiliated with the venture firm of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers at the time of its investments in Amazon and Google. At Elevation, I was an early investor in Facebook and a mentor to Mark Zuckerberg from 2006 to 2009. Since 2017, I have been a critic of Facebook and Google’s business models and business practices, specifically their massive collection of private data, their commercial exploitation of that data, and their manipulation of attention and behavior. My book on the subject, Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe, is a New York Times bestseller.