Josh Sirefman must have known what was coming when he finished up his keynote speech at Mipim Proptech New York last month. No sooner had Sidewalk Labs’ chief development officer thanked the audience for their attention than a sea of hands flew up and the questions came in thick and fast.
Not unlike the public reaction to Sidewalk Toronto – a new district the urban innovation arm of Google’s parent company Alphabet hopes to build “from the internet up” – the vast majority of the queries focused on data. Or more specifically, data use, protection and privacy.
From the minute the Sidewalk Toronto project became public knowledge back in 2017, fears over privacy – particularly in reaction to the proposed use of sensors to track real-time usage of the district – have been raised vehemently and often. In June this year, the latest in a run of controversy hit the headlines when a 1,500-page document released by Sidewalk Labs outlining proposals for its plans to “improve the urban environment”, sparked more questions from citizens who have expressed concerns about becoming “lab rats”.
It came as no surprise to see Sirefman put on the spot with some challenging questions around this subject last month. Well prepared, professional and seemingly unflappable, he dealt with them calmly, sometimes with a hint of crowd-pleasing humour – “respond to all of the criticism? I’ve only got 15 minutes you know”.
Data sharing concerns
He conceded that Sidewalk Labs started the Toronto project with some naivety and added that, since work began on the scheme, the understanding around the risks of data sharing had escalated and had been at the forefront of the development as a result.
He then said that by addressing concerns over data sharing with a new policy, the group was arguably “ahead of everyone else” and had effectively created a new model that could be rolled out across projects the world over. “We have evolved to a position now as a result of this increasing focus on data and privacy where government will set the guidelines for use of data on this project,” he said. “There will be guidelines for everything. For example, where there are sensors, building managers will be required to go through a process to get permission to use that data. There is no other model like this, as far as I am aware, for a policy around data capture in the public realm.”
Such a bold claim requires a bit of investigation. Has Sidewalk Labs really fuelled the creation of a new data capture model for public realm projects that could be rolled out across similar schemes across the globe? The company’s chief executive Dan Doctoroff backs the claim: “We have proposed an urban data policy that we think is a huge leap forward in terms of the way data collected in public or semi-public spaces can be managed.”
Unique challenges
Dan Hughes, founder of the Real Estate Data foundation, or RED Foundation, which was set up to agree industry best practice around data and ethics and to help real estate effectively use data for the good of the pubic and the sector, agrees that Sidewalk Labs has come up with a “sensible, balanced way of dealing with data on a city level”.
He says that the proposed policy is, however, more likely to be a source of lessons for others to learn from, rather than a copy and paste approach to data policy and management.
“Sidewalk Labs has a unique opportunity and therefore some unique problems given the size of this project. This is city planning on a massive scale and because of what they are proposing, they will inevitably come across a lot of data sharing and use problems. What they are doing around data management will, I’m sure, result in some good lessons that can be transferred to other projects but there is no such thing as a one-size-fits-all system for managing data on this scale.
“It is true that the more data you use, the better the building and the insights but you have to demonstrate value. I think Google is quite transparent from a Google Maps perspective. The risks and problems come when data is captured that the user doesn’t know about. That is why there are so many issues around facial recognition. There is a perception of being spied on.”
On the subject of working alongside government as Sidewalk Labs is proposing, Hughes says that a number of different bodies will need to be created to govern the use of data but that governments have a part to play. The problem, he says, comes down to the speed at which they can move.
“Government and the public sector are in a difficult position,” he says. “Most have to move very slowly and that’s why real estate really needs to come together and speak as one voice on this. As a sector we are good at following but not very good at leading and this is something we really do need to lead on.”
This, he adds, is where Sidewalk Labs should be studied as a trailblazer. “Use of data in the built environment is one of biggest possible issues that we will face in this sector worldwide for decades to come. Real estate needs to come to terms with this. Sidewalk Labs has necessarily faced these issues earlier than others and as a result it will have done a huge amount of work and research that others can really learn from. There is no perfect answer, but it is better than no answer.”
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