Sidewalk Labs document reveals company’s early vision for data collection, tax powers, criminal justice

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Sidewalk Labs document reveals company’s early vision for data collection,
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A confidential Sidewalk Labs document from 2016 lays out the founding vision of the Google-affiliated development company, which included having the power to levy its own property taxes, track and predict people’s movements and control some public services.
The document, which The Globe and Mail has seen, also describes how people living in a Sidewalk community would interact with and have access to the space around them – an experience based, in part, on how much data they’re willing to share, and which could ultimately be used to reward people for “good behaviour.”
Known internally as the “yellow book,” the document was designed as a pitch book for the company, and predates Sidewalk’s relationship and formal agreements with Toronto by more than a year.
In Detroit, Sidewalk projected a “10.5-per-cent levered [internal rate of return] over a 30-year period calculated solely on proceeds from real estate and not including any revenue from other products or services,” based on a US$2.3-billion equity investment.
To carry out its vision and planned services, the book states Sidewalk wanted to control its area much like Disney World does in Florida, where in the 1960s it “persuaded the legislature of the need for extraordinary exceptions.” This could include granting Sidewalk taxation powers.
Early on, the company notes that a Sidewalk neighbourhood would collect real-time position data “for all entities” – including people.
Sidewalk visitors and residents would be “encouraged to add data about themselves and connect their accounts, either to take advantage of premium services like unlimited wireless connectivity or to make interactions in the district easier,” it says.
Shoshana Zuboff, the Harvard University professor emerita whose book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism investigates the way Alphabet and other big-tech companies are reshaping the world, called the document’s revelations “damning

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