She is one of Canada's most respected experts on data privacy. And she just resigned her paid role for a smart city project in Toronto.
StateScoop reports on what is at stake:
Ann Cavoukian, Ontario’s former privacy commissioner and expert-in-residence at Ryerson University, resigned as a paid consultant for Sidewalk Labs last week over concerns that the data collected by sensors and other technologies in the Quayside neighborhood would not be anonymized by third-party players.
“People don’t have an opportunity to consent to their data being collected—it’s going to be collected automatically with sensors and other technologies. Given that you can’t consent, it has to, automatically, be de-identified at source the minute it's collected,” Cavoukian told StateScoop.
This is the latest blow to the project, which former Blackberry CEO Jim Balsillie called, “A colonizing experiment in surveillance capitalism attempting to bulldoze important urban, civic and political issues.”
You can read his op-ed for yourself, which has a catchy title: Sidewalk Toronto has only one beneficiary, and it is not Toronto.
This is another big week for privacy concerns around the world. Check out Big Data Privacy: Google vs. Apple and How They're Talking About It. The story includes explosive comments from Apple CEO Tim Cook about how our own data is being weaponized and used against us.