❗️Google’s Sidewalk Labs Plans to Package and Sell Location Data on Millions of Cellphones👁
• 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urban planners rely on processes like surveys and trip counters that are often time-consuming, labour-intensive, and outdated.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.
