Dark Clouds - To the Cloud: Big Data in a Turbulent World - page 127

factories, they will continue to have problems making sound decisions. It
is striking, but not surprising, to observe how confused people appear to
be about the cloud. I have talked to people with graduate degrees who
still think it has something to do with actual clouds, with communica-
tion satellites, or with the weather (e.g., the system can go down in the
rain). Surveys conirm the public's confusion about the cloud (Linthicum
2013a). At best, the general public sees it as “one big storage space,” which
at least comprehends one piece of the cloud puzzle (Abdul 2013). 1 Get-
ting a handle on the language matters a great deal, especially in an era
that lauds advertising and promotion, suitably dressed up in terms like
strategic communication. Giant power projects in the desert are called
solar farms (Soto 2011), and diesel-spewing information-processing fac-
tories are known as clouds . Factories, whether in the desert or in a small
town, are not inherently bad, but people need to know what they really
are before they approve construction, determine whether or what kind
of incentives to provide, and establish an appropriate regulatory regime.
This chapter takes a step toward providing a critical understanding by
examining some of the major problems associated with cloud computing,
concentrating on environmental and power issues, privacy, security, and
employment.
E-pollution
Advertising aside, we have known for some time that computers are not
a green technology. Chemicals used in their components are among the
most carcinogenic. Silicon Valley long led the list of extreme toxic-waste
sites in the United States, and today China and many poor nations con-
tain mountains of computer parts making up a dangerous chemical stew.
According to Maxwell and Miller (2012a, 3), by 2007 between 20 and
50 million tons of e-waste were generated annually, most of it from cell
phones, televisions, and computers that people sent to the dump. E-waste is
mostly produced in the developed West and disposed of in Latin America,
Africa, Eastern Europe, India, Southeast Asia, and China. In recent years,
India and China have joined the leaders in waste production. Over the
ten-year period from 1997 to 2007, the United States alone discarded 500
million computers containing over 6 billion pounds of plastics, over 1.5