"I imagined us creating a Smart City of Privacy, as opposed to a Smart City of Surveillance," Ann Cavoukian, the former privacy commissioner of Ontario, wrote in her resignation letter from Google sister company Sidewalk Labs, reports Global News.

A year ago, Waterfront Toronto enlisted Alphabet-backed Sidewalk Labs to create a plan for a smart city neighborhood in the city's Quayside development. As a consultant for the endeavor, Cavoukian developed a plan called Privacy by Design that was meant to ensure that citizens' personal data would be protected.

But the project has faced skepticism and criticism from the start. In an op-ed published earlier this month, former BlackBerry CEO Jim Balsillie referred to the development as "a colonizing experiment in surveillance capitalism attempting to bulldoze important urban, civic and political issues."