Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Telematics and Informatics journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/tele Is civic data governance the key to democratic smart cities? The role of the urban data trust in Sidewalk Toronto Anna Artyushina Graduate Program in Science and Technology Studies, Norman Bethune College 218, York University, 4700 Keele Street, Toronto, Ontario M3J 1P3, Canada ARTICLE INFO Keywords: Data trust Smart city Sidewalk Labs Assets Rentiership Privacy ABSTRACT Over the two and a half years of its existence, Alphabet/Sidewalk Labs’ smart city project in Toronto, Canada has been at the center of successive controversies relating to its proprietary approach to personal data. To address these concerns, Sidewalk Labs suggested putting the data collected in the smart city in a trust. As a “steward of urban data and the public interest,” the Urban Data Trust was expected to protect residents’ privacy, establish responsible data sharing standards, and provide individuals with a share in the profits derived from the data gathered about them. This article proposes technoscientific/platform capitalism theories as a theoretical framework in the research on data governance. I situate the Urban Data Trust within a series of policy responses to the problem of extractive data practices. I posit that the company’s data governance approach appeals to and sustains a political-economic regime governed by the logic of rent seeking, which aims to entrench the economic dominance of technological monopolies. 1. Introduction Privacy laws in North America and Europe have primarily focused on governments, leaving the governance of personal data by the private sector largely unregulated. The prevalence of private governance has increasingly led to personal data being treated as a private asset by data collectors and data processors (Cohen, 2017; Edwards, 2018; Delacroix and Lawrence, 2018). Recent studies have argued that the assetization of personal data has emerged as a key issue in contemporary capitalism, which is characterized by a radical shift away from production to the extraction of economic rents (Birch, 2020; Birch, 2017a; Paul and Leyshon, 2016; Srnicek, 2016). It is in this political economic context that technology companies have begun marketing “smart cities” as a data-driven solution to a range of societal problems (e.g., congestion, ill health, crime). They are premised on designing technologies that turn urban infrastructure into digital platforms for data-collecting devices. However, in the wake of the 2018 Cambridge Analytica scandal and the global outrage at the Chinese government employing smart technologies to profile and oppress its citizens, smart cities have become a major policy issue. Seeking to enjoy the benefits of digitization and automation while protecting privacy, policy makers are developing novel governance models to put the collection and use of personal data in smart cities under collective or public man- agement and oversight. In this article, I use a case study of Sidewalk Toronto/Quayside 1 to explore data trusts—legal instruments that promise to break the existing power dynamic between citizens and data collectors by placing the data collected in the smart city under public https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tele.2020.101456 Received 20 January 2020; Received in revised form 16 June 2020; Accepted 19 June 2020 E-mail address: artanna@yorku.ca. 1 Sidewalk Toronto has been redubbed Quayside, with the former being a project name suggested by the company at the early stage of the project, and the latter being a local toponym for the swath of land where the smart city was planned to be built. Telematics and Informatics 55 (2020) 101456 Available online 06 July 2020 0736-5853/ © 2020 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. T