Sidewalk Labs has left the city and while some have lamented their departure, I for one, am delighted that after much debate over the extent of Alphabet's reach, through their subsidiary Sidewalk Labs, they have decided to leave, using the COVID-19 crisis as a lame attempt to hide the fact that the opposition they were facing was growing by the day.
I wrote about the issue before and explained why it was a dangerous proposition to leave a company like google in charge of such a large project and with insufficient accountability regarding the collection and usage of private data.
This is an amazing opportunity for the city to go back to the drawing board and rethink their whole approach to city building and at the same time make sure that the whole process is more democratic.
We often hear about governments abusing their powers and wasting taxpayers money, but a worrying trend over the past few years has emerged from the "capitalist" -in name only- side of the aisle where too many tech companies are slowly but surely turning into surveillance apparatuses that would give Jeremy Bentham wet dreams if he were still alive.
This is not a problem that is going to be solved overnight, so stay tuned for more articles where we discuss this issue with experts on city-building, starting with Naama Blonder and Howard Tam.
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