it’s not a context thing, it’s (as the article makes clear) a complete disagreement over your point #3. She does not believe the trust should be empowered to hold the de-anonymized raw data at all or grant acccess to it to any party at all, over concerns that it is both too valuable a hacking target and that companies will be incentivized to ask for as much data as they can get whether or not they “need” it. She has little faith in the ability of contracts to enforce data access and deletion policies on private companies (nor should she, in my opinion, as we’ve seen how little impact they had on restraining the (mis-)use of Facebook data)
[0]:https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/06/president-obama-called...
Sometimes its like they want to put their arm behind the couch to relax. Then they let their hand rest on your shoulder. Then it creeps down a little further.
Do you have to wait for the hand to actually touch something sensitive to try to put a stop to it?
After experimenting, then we as a society can decide not to permit something, not before.
As an analogy, what if burning fossil fuels were banned worldwide in 1900 because people were too conservative about pollution? We all agree that pollution is bad, but we should be willing to permit some amount of negative side effects if we want progress. Otherwise, we'd still be living in medieval times.
1. As a private company, they don't believe they should be responsible with setting public policy. They want a separate board to be set up for that.
2. By default, everything should be private.
3. They're proposing that if an applicant has a compelling reason to access raw data, they need to have it approved by the governing board, and raw data is automatically destroyed after a short interval.
They gave the example of video feeds, which are both common in public spaces and are not anonymous (even if you blur faces). If they're being thoughtful and responsible, they need some mechanism to handle desirable exceptions. This sounds like a proposal to do so.
In the article, the person who resigned is presented as a respected expert on the subject. Maybe that person has more context that didn't make it into the article. But the facts presented - "group designing public space is proposing policy to handle aspects that can't easily be made anonymous" - don't warrant the clickbait title or the editorialization.
Sounds like Sidewalk is doing it's diligence - thinking about the things a group designing a "city of the future" _should_ be thinking about.