Susan Crawford ci mette in guarda sui rischi del coinvolgimento di Google nell'urban planning e IoT per le citta In partnering with local governments to create infrastructure, Alphabet says it is only trying to help. Local governments shouldn’t believe it. <https://www.wired.com/story/sidewalk-labs-toronto-google-risks/> Chicago handed over control of its parking meters to a cadre of private investors. Officials pitched the deal as an innovative win-win. In exchange for a 75-year lease, the cash-strapped city got a lump sum. In fact, that large upfront payment was far less than the meters’ potential revenue—it was more than $1 billion too low <https://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/one-billion-dollars-parking-meter-fias...>. In an upcoming article <http://law.huji.ac.il/sites/default/files/law/files/reclaiming_fiduciary_law...>, professors Max Schanzenbach and Nadav Shoked of Northwestern Law School point out that the city got away with that bad deal, in part, because it was a city. Schanzenbach and Shoked argue that if a private corporation had done what Chicago did—entering into an arrangement aimed at solving "short-term financial problems, without properly considering the long-term implications of the deal," as Chicago’s Office of the Inspector General put it at the time—it would have been sued for violating its duty of care. The distinction may seem small, but as cities become embroiled with private companies, promising to fund and build city infrastructure, it’s worth ironing out what obligations a city owes its residents. Beginning last fall, Toronto has been getting a flood of publicity <https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/29/world/canada/google-toronto-city-future.h...> about a deal with Sidewalk Labs <https://www.wired.com/story/google-sidewalk-labs-toronto-quayside/>, part of Google spinoff Alphabet <https://www.wired.com/tag/alphabet/>. Reports describe the deal as giving Sidewalk the authority to build in an undeveloped 12-acre portion of the city called Quayside. The idea is that Sidewalk will collect data about everything from water use to air quality to the perambulations of Quayside's future populace and use that data to run energy, transport, and all other systems. Swarms of sensors inside and outside buildings and on streets will be constantly on duty, monitoring and modulating. But Toronto recently revealed <http://app.toronto.ca/tmmis/getMeetingMonitor.do?function=doPrepare&meetingI...> that deal has put it in a tough place. A nonprofit development corporation, not the city, made the arrangement with Google that sparked all the publicity—the city itself doesn't appear to have known a deal with Google was in the works. Now the situation appears messy: The details of the arrangement are not public, the planning process is being paid for by Google, and Google won’t continue funding that process unless government authorities promise they’ll reach a final agreement that aligns with Google’s interests. Those interests include Google's desire to expand its Toronto experiments beyond that 12-acre Quayside plot. Toronto, like Chicago, seems to be holding too few of the cards. Yet the city still has a chance to act as a good steward by avoiding the long-term risks that come with involving Google in urban planning. [..]