Sidewalk Toronto was the flagship project of Sidewalk Labs, the smart-city subsidiary of Google’s parent company, Alphabet. It was the largest smart-city project planned in North America or Europe. It is also the most notable failure of such a project to date.

Smart city projects and the technologies behind them improve the delivery and efficiency of city services, produce data to help local policymakers learn from their policy interventions and bring several economic development benefits. At the same time, they can create important risks to fundamental rights and enhance the capabilities of corporate and public surveillance. When Sidewalk Toronto was abandoned many suspected it was because of the concerns and opposition it raised regarding the risks of increased corporate surveillance it posed.

Although concerns about surveillance were the political driver of Sidewalk Toronto’s failure, this Article argues that the reason why the project failed, and perhaps had to fail, is because there was no apt legal framework to sustain it. Sidewalk Toronto was an interesting project from a local economic development perspective, and from an innovation perspective. However, existing privacy laws in Canada were not up for the task of handling, reasonably limiting, and ensuring the safe use of ubiquitous data collection in the city’s public spaces and infrastructures. Additionally, and most importantly, the public-private structure of governance behind the project was unaccountable and unfit to oversee its safe development.

This Article demonstrates that the interplay between data protection law and public and private governance structures that govern smart city projects around the world are crucial to guarantee smart cities safety and trustworthiness; and for cities to be able to harness their benefits. In doing so, this Article calls for not only reform of data governance law, but also reform in other fields of law better equipped with dealing with the power asymmetries and particularities of the sectors where digital technologies are being adopted. This Article focuses on cities and how local law and governance should be adapted to address these risks.

While digital technologies promise solutions to urgent urban challenges, the Sidewalk Toronto story teaches a stark lesson: without robust legal frameworks and accountable institutions, smart city projects around the world will create substantial risks.

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