I'll add another perspective to this, beyond the privacy/data ownership debate. The global building stock currently supplies roughly 40% of the world's greenho

I'll add another perspective to this, beyond the privacy/data ownership debate. The global building stock currently supplies roughly 40% of the world's greenhouse gas emissions; and we are in the midst of the largest growth of urbanism in human history concentrated in neighborhoods least equipped to deal with it. I've worked in the architecture/urban design sector for 6+ years (half as an architect, half as a researcher), and one of the most critical problems we have to address is the way we are attempting to optimize the building energy/embodied carbon use of buildings. It's a messy multivariable optimization problem, tied to time-consuming, complex simulation engines, that the industry is forced to try and solve as single-variable optimization with various hacks and rule of thumbs. I am very biased on this topic since I work in this area, but I feel this is fundamentally a ML/AI problem and I had/have some hope that Sidewalk labs could add the resources and brainpower to move the needle further, faster with the existing SOTA. Personally, I felt this provided the project with a very straightforward, explicit ethical utility, so as a Torontonian I've never been against it. I also was excited about the prospect of building up a community of building science-focused ML/AI researchers tackling a currently underserved existential threat. I know this isn't the end of Sidewalk Labs, but I feel like this is a huge loss for us.