The Sidewalk Labs Case

Following up to the first blog post on data trusts, a concrete example of these types of trusts is the case of Sidewalk Labs, which demonstrates the practical difficulty of applying and implementing data trusts and how its governance is essential to its perrenity. This project was cancelled in May 2020 due to, among other things1, the lack of a clear legislative framework, clarity regarding roles and responsibilities, specifically the beneficiaries of the trust and the question of ownership of the data.

In October 2017, Sidewalk Labs, announced its plan to develop a sensor-driven smart city on Toronto’s waterfront2. Many controversies and privacy issues arose from the project. Alphabet inc.3, the company at the base of the project, failed to propose a healthy data governance framework. To remedy this, the idea of a data trust was put forward. The data, collected by private and public sectors, would be governed by an independent entity, which would oversee the management of data collection devices placed in the public domain and address the challenges of the use of the data, specifically related to algorithmic decision-making.

Unfortunately, criticism was raised due to the vagueness of the conception of the trust and because of the lack of regulatory framework governing it. Sidewalk Labs also failed to identify the beneficiaries, the most fundamental element of the data trust: would they be the residents of Toronto in general or the specific residents of the smart city? Another complicating element around the implementation of the data trust was that, under Canadian law, the general public cannot be a beneficiary, which was problematic in this case. Lastly, Sidewalk Labs also failed to put forward clear roles and responsibilities in the governance of the trust and to precisely establish to whom did the data within the trust belong to.

These are all very common issues preventing the implementation of a data trust.

Ce contenu a été mis à jour le 1 avril 2021 à 21 h 42 min.