Google’s Sidewalk Labs Plans to Package and Sell Location Data on Millions of Cellphones

guest · Jan 28, 2019

Google’s Sidewalk Labs Plans to Package and Sell Location Data on Millions of Cellphones
January 28, 2019
https://theintercept.com/2019/01/28/google-alphabet-sidewalk-labs-replica-cellphone-data/

Most of the data collected by urban planners is messy, complex, and difficult to represent.
A new initiative from Sidewalk Labs, the city-building subsidiary of Google’s parent company Alphabet, has set out to change that.

The program, known as Replica, offers planning agencies the ability to model an entire city’s patterns of movement.
To make these measurements, the program gathers and de-identifies the location of cellphone users, which it obtains from unspecified third-party vendors.

The program comes at a time of growing unease with how tech companies use and share our personal data — and raises new questions about Google’s encroachment on the physical world.
Yet because the exact sources of data have not been revealed, it is unclear whether Replica draws from the ranks of unregulated apps that profit from indefinite privacy policies to continuously collect users’ precise whereabouts.
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“Replica is a perfect example of surveillance capitalism, profiting from information collected from and about us as we use the products that have become a part of our lives,” said Brenda McPhail, director of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association’s Privacy, Technology, and Surveillance Project.
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mirimir · Jan 29, 2019

Well, this program in particular doesn't seem that problematic. As long as the data is averaged out enough.

What is freaky is the existence of so much location data to be "de-identified". At the risk of being boring, it's the panopticon. You never know who's watching. Santa knows if you've been bad

guest · Sep 12, 2019

Sidewalk Labs' controversial data collection project is now a company
Alphabet’s Replica maps the movement of pedestrians for city planners
September 12, 2019
https://www.engadget.com/2019/09/12/sidewalk-labs-replica-series-a-funding/

Replica, a controversial data-gathering initiative for city planners, has now become an official company. Alphabet's city-building incubator Sidewalk Labs confirmed today that the program has closed Series A funding and is now hiring for new roles in its Kansas City and San Francisco offices.

Nick Bowden, Replica's CEO and co-founder, tried to address privacy fears in a blog post announcing the spinout. He stressed that no single user's location data would be identifiable under Replica. "Replica is not interested in the movement of individuals; we are interested in the collective movement of a particular place. [...]"
But others argue that the sensitivity of mobile phone location data, when held against Big Tech's poor track record in safeguarding user privacy, isn't exactly an encouraging combination. Critics maintain that location data is easy to re-identify, even if it has already been de-identified.

So far, Replica has worked with Kansas City, Chicago, Sacramento and Portland. Bowden said that it will be launching full-scale operations in those cities over the next few months.
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Google’s Sidewalk Labs Plans to Package and Sell Location Data on Millions of Cellphones

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