The Toronto portion of this seven-city study focuses on interviews with policymakers, industry actors and civil-society organizations.

The project is a seven-city examination of smart city initiatives: Toronto, Calgary, Stockholm, Barcelona, Singapore, Taipei, and Seoul. It seeks to explore: the objectives of smart city initiatives, as well as their initiators, social coordination logics, modes of legitimization and scales at which they are organized. Insights will provide valuable guidance for future smart city initiatives, helping to identify conditions under which such initiatives foster more open, participatory, just, and sustainable forms of urban development. The primary research question asks, can embedding information and communications technologies (ICTs) in the urban fabric help solve cities’ intricate problems and improve wellbeing? This research focuses on the Toronto portion of the project.

Natasha Tusikov is the principal investigator of a SSHRC Insight Development Grant (2019-2022) entitled “Governing Knowledge and Data in Smart Cities,” in cooperation with Dr. Blayne Haggart and Dr. Nicole Goodman (Brock University), and Dr. Zachary Spicer (University of Western Ontario). This project investigates the central role that the control of data plays in smart cities. The project examines the interaction between state and non-state actors in regulating the creation and use of information within the knowledge-based economy. The project will assess the choices, practices, and norms that shape data collection, analysis, and use, the devices that capture data, and the relationships among government, private sector, and civil society in these processes.

Drawing on the smart city plan designed for Toronto’s Quayside neighbourhood and proposed by Sidewalk Labs, a subsidy of Google’s parent company, Alphabet Inc. as a case study, the project will answer the following questions:
How do the various actors understand the role of knowledge in the production, use and control over data?
Who establishes the rules governing the collection, use and ownership of data?
How does the collection and control of data affect public policy and government regulatory activities?
What are the implications of the rules governing data on access to information, democratic decision making, and for social inclusion in the community?

This project explores the nature, limits and possibilities of global governance of what British International Political Economist Susan Strange (1994) calls the “knowledge structure,” that part of the political economy involving control over the production, control, and legitimization of knowledge. It focuses on two key and related aspects of the knowledge structure: internet governance; and intellectual property (IP) and data governance. In other words, our research focuses on the means by which information (in the colloquial sense) is communicated, and the means by which information is turned into economically and socially valuable commodities. While these issues are usually examined in isolation, in practice they are intimately related, with IP governing the content flowing over the network and internet governance setting the terms of access and use of the network itself.

This project investigates two key aspects of the regulation of knowledge creation and dissemination (what we call knowledge governance, or the knowledge structure): the heterogeneity of the state and non-state actors involved in this area (which actors are involved); and the scope of knowledge governance (the nature and effects of this governance). On the first aspect, the popularization and spread of the internet has had a dramatic effect on governance structures. Regarding the second aspect, the control of knowledge – intellectual property rights that allow for the appropriation of value in production, or the capture of personal data for the purposes of selling advertising or attempting to ensure state security – has become a (if not the) vector for political, social and economic power. This project has three main research questions:
1. In terms of governance, which actors are shaping the rules that govern how knowledge is created, disseminated and used in a digital world?
2. What are the social (economic, political, and creative) effects of these rules?
3. What representational and distributional issues are posed by the specific forms of knowledge governance currently in place, and how can these challenges best be addressed?

The goal of this project is to examine the potential effects on Canadians’ privacy of non-legally binding or ‘informal’ regulatory regimes that are undertaken by globally operating Internet firms and online payment providers. In particular, the project explores risks to Canadian’s privacy resulting from the involvement of Internet companies in informal regulatory agreements with intellectual property rights holders. The expansion of e-commerce facilitates the ability of consumers to acquire counterfeit goods and copyright infringing content such as unauthorised downloads of music, film, and software. To address this behaviour, multinational rights holders, such as Nike, Gucci, Proctor and Gamble, and Microsoft are forming enforcement partnerships with large, mostly U.S.-based Internet firms and payment providers like Google, PayPal and Visa. Instead of using legislation or judicial remedies like litigation or court orders, however, these rights holders are increasingly using non-legally binding regulatory agreements. These agreements, which do not have the force or legitimacy of law, are composed of broadly worded minimum guidelines to direct Internet firms’ enforcement efforts. Under these agreements, Internet firms and payment providers act voluntarily to remove Internet content from websites determined to be illicitly distributing counterfeit products or copyright-infringing material.

This project speaks to two of the Office of the Privacy Commissioner’s priorities, namely the business of collecting, using and disclosing information on the Internet, and analysis of companies’ codes of practice relating to privacy. The project’s objectives are to explore the following questions to assess how informal enforcement programs operating in Canada, the United States and European Union may affect Canadians’ privacy:
1) What information from Canadians do intermediaries share with third parties in relation these informal agreements?
2) What laws and policies govern intermediaries’ sharing of personal information with other corporate actors within these informal agreements, and to what extent are intermediaries compliant?