I am very much not a fan of this project, but I will point out that the problem you're describing has an easy solution; a microphone can record conversations, but the output of a microphone can be fed to an algorithm that never keeps that recording and only records the noise level in dB.
If you've ever used a toilet that flushes itself automatically when you leave, you've been in a bathroom with a tiny camera watching you. No one ever worries about the privacy implications of this, because that tiny camera does nothing with this information except decide if it's light or dark immediately in front of it. The image data isn't stored, it's just thrown away.
Is Google going to record thousands of hours of sidewalk microphone recordings and store them somewhere? Seems far more likely they're just going to stream a "Currently it's 60dB at this intersection"; meets their requirements with minimal bandwidth and infrastructure.
Why would you use as camera as the sensor for simple presence detection? An IR LED+photoresistor is much cheaper.
> No one ever worries about the privacy implications of this
Yes, I certainly would be suspicious of both the camera and the attached microprocessor needed to "decide if it's light or dark" from "image data". Anybody that chooses to pay for that kind of massive over-engineering instead of using a cheap IR emitter+detector is trying to do more than just flush the toilet.
> Is Google going to record thousands of hours of sidewalk microphone recordings and store them somewhere?
Why not? It's a trivial[1] amount of data after you apply a simple noise gate and a low bandwidth codec.
You mean... A tiny camera? A photoresistor is a device which measures light hitting it. It's a 1-pixel camera. In exactly the same way a decibelmeter is a little microphone.
My point is, OP is looking for some complicated algorithm to detect and eliminate speech, but you don't need that - you can just eliminate pretty much everything in the first place.
> Why not? It's a trivial[1] amount of data after you apply a simple noise gate and a low bandwidth codec.
5.6kbit/s to record noise levels is like using a CCD camera and a microprocessor for image detection. You could sample the noise level once every 10 minutes, store it in a uint32, and you'd get 5.6kbit/hundred days. You could ship the data over an SMS link. The units could be battery powered and last months.
> Is Google going to record thousands of hours of sidewalk microphone recordings and store them somewhere? Seems far more likely they're just going to stream a "Currently it's 60dB at this intersection"; meets their requirements with minimal bandwidth and infrastructure.
It "seems" to you that Google will actively choose to not record data that would be considered invasive. That's not good enough, though. First, it doesn't seem that way to me at all, I completely disagree with how much data I would expect Google to collect in this situation, and I completely disagree that a dB reading at a lat,lng point will be sufficient for Google's algorithms to do their required work.
Again, the main point I'm trying to bring is not the technical issues, but the societal ones. It is too much surveillance issued directly to a company with no regard for discussing the issues openly. It's just not right.
I think you are reading more into it than you should.
No, I certainly propose a city should measure it. I propose it be done with taxpayer dollars, open source software, and in an otherwise fully open and democratic way by the city.
I do not think corporations should build themselves into cities with a specific plan for surveillance in mind.
> There is a difference between gathering aggregate data about a neighborhood, and individual surveillance.
Not much of one, depending on the neighborhood and how the data is collected. We're all told that the employees at Google, Facebook, etc have very limited access to customer data, but that oversight is also very unknown and opaque to the outside world, and not trusted. I'm certainly not ready to trust Google with an idea of "no individual surveillance" in their city, when obviously as soon as I go in their with my Android phone they know who I am anyway.
> I think you are reading more into it than you should.
No way. Google is showing their ambitions at running human society in a very closed, scary, surveillance-enabled way. If anything I'm reading too little into their plans.
This, I agree with. Google is not in this for the "public good".
I know people who are ranked very highly in the Google maps "guide" program. I wonder what kind of witchcraft Google uses to get people to spend hundreds of hours donating information about their cities in order to improve a proprietary map program for free. -_-
I don't see the big deal about microphones used for decibel measuremrnts potentially being used to keep audio. Companies record video and audio outside their premises all the time.
It's this kind of tone-deafness I was trying to describe in how Google talks about their plans. Yes, I'm aware that companies do that kind of surveillance on their own property. But what Google is trying to here is test out how to build entire cities. Surely you see the important difference and user expectation when it comes to a very clearly designed and secured corporate building or campus vs. an entire section of a residential and commercial city.
> The area will have plenty of sensors collecting data - from traffic, noise and air quality - and monitoring the performance of the electric grid and waste collection.
...
> Sidewalk Labs told the BBC that the sensors will not be used to monitor and collect information on citizens, rather it will be used to allow governments to be flexible about how neighbourhoods are used.
Those two sentences are not compatible. The sensors will be used to observe - surveil - citizens in cars, citizens talking and at the same time, won't be used to monitor or collect information about citizens? How?
Does Google have any plans to describe how they will eliminate human-spoken conversations from their noise detection? Such work can be done. Will they do it? That seems like Problem #1 to address: Google claims they will shove microphones along the streets everywhere but "promise us they won't listen to you"........okay? I don't buy it for a second. Talk to us about it, at least, and don't just say "we promise not to monitor human speech" and leave it at that. This is a hugely important conversation and Google is ignoring it. You can't just plaster public space with corporate surveillance tools and then walk around whistling and ignoring the huge social movement against your never-ending privacy invasion.
> What is clear is that green will be top of the agenda
None of the proposal sounds green to me. The amount of effort that will go into building it seems likely to offset any gains it would save over time through pollution reduction, etc.
The entire thing sounds like it would need new factories, new dedicated infrastructure, and none of it is remotely green-sounding. Where will all of this stuff come from? Is it truly better and less pollutant than an old-world, more simple solution might be?
I'm hopeful for Sidewalk Labs. But it seems like the Reddit Redesign to me: making every single obvious mistake that you could make, while the outside world yells at you "please reddit don't be digg 2.0! please Google don't make a massive dystopian total-surveillance society! please!)