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

Photo by Franki Chamaki on Unsplash

Google’s Sidewalk Labs Plans to Package and Sell Location Data on Millions of Cellphones
Most of the data collected by urban planners are messy, complex, and difficult to represent. It looks nothing like the…theintercept.com

• The program, known as Replica, offers planning agencies the ability to model an entire city’s patterns of movement. Like “SimCity,” Replica’s “user-friendly” tool deploys statistical simulations to give a comprehensive view of how, when, and where people travel in urban areas.
• Typical urban planners rely on processes like surveys and trip counters that are often time-consuming, labour-intensive, and outdated. Replica, instead, uses real-time mobile location data.❗️
• Sidewalk Labs has instituted significant protections to safeguard privacy before it even begins creating a synthetic population. Any location data that Sidewalk Labs receives is already de-identified (using methods such as aggregation, differential privacy techniques, or outright removal of unique behaviours).

• The program comes at a time of growing unease with how tech companies use and share our data — and raises new questions about Google’s encroachment on the physical world.