The City of Toronto collects data from the public every day. We pay TTC fares with a smart card, we register for recreation programs online, and cameras across Toronto monitor traffic. As technology advances, the collection of personal data has become commonplace in everyday life.

Smart Cities — urban areas that use technology and data collection to manage resources, infrastructure and day-to-day operations — are just one example of how technology is becoming more present in city life. We need to build a vision for how technology impacts our city: a vision for privacy, data, and smart cities in Toronto. If we don’t lead, others will make the important decisions for us about how our data is collected and utilized.

Around the world, private corporations want to start using technology to build smart cities and defining the rules as they go. Locally, the proposal by Sidewalk Labs for Quayside has generated significant discussion about privacy, data collection, and trust. In Toronto, we want innovation. We want new creative ideas, and new jobs, tackling some of our most complex, and pressing, challenges. But we need to do it right.

If private partners are going to pursue technology-focused projects, Toronto needs to first develop its own vision for how we should move forward. We need to decide how data should be collected, managed and used, to ensure it's in the best interest of all Torontonians. We must lead, so our partners can follow.

When communities explore innovative new ideas, we expect governments to act in our interests, and we trust them as they share grand ideas, and experiment, and even mess up, because they’re accountable to us. Governments act for the public, and answer to the public. With private entities so often focused on profits rather than the public interest, we don’t have that trust or that accountability.

Following in the footsteps of cities like Barcelona, a framework for data in Toronto should set out the city’s vision for data collection, management, and use in the public realm.

There are risks associated with smart city proposals, such as the personal identification of individuals, tracking of behaviours, and the use of algorithms in decision-making processes, that could negatively impact Toronto’s residents. The market for user data is huge and growing, and across North America and beyond, data from a myriad of services (apps, websites, tracking data from smartphones and phone carriers) is being collected and resold, sometimes without the knowledge of the public.

Too much of our world relies on online services, and too much goes on behind the scenes for us to expect people to opt-out or consent — it’s not a legitimate option. We want innovation, but we also want to mitigate harm.

However, there are also opportunities to improve safety, efficiency, planning and delivery of public services with the development of new smart technologies and the information and efficiency that data can provide. We simply must ensure that the public good is our first consideration, not an afterthought. Our data must benefit us as a city first and foremost, being drawn on to make more efficient, livable spaces, services, and programs.

This week city council will debate a call to develop a made-in-Toronto vision for data in the era of smart cities. This new policy would be applied to the Quayside proposal and others like it, to protect privacy, transparency, accountability and the public interest, underpinned by other city policy principles, such as public ownership, equity and human rights.

A robust public consultation process would be a crucial part of the development of the policy, including a jurisdictional review of other cities’ work and consultation with leading institutions and organizations in the field.

A civic framework for privacy, public data, and smart cities should cover all public services, public buildings, and public spaces. The city should also consider guidelines for where the city has influence over how private spaces are designed and built (e.g., planning/building design, and services regulated by the city, like taxis).

Toronto isn’t the first city to deal with these issues. There are so many we can learn from. But, we need a made in Toronto solution that is accountable to those who live and work here. Like so much of what makes us unique, we can continue to innovate while we also ensure that innovation benefits the many, rather than the few.

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