Dark Clouds - To the Cloud: Big Data in a Turbulent World - page 134

The cloud industry, which proits by storing and processing other
people's secrets, is among the most secretive itself. Companies do not
reveal the location of their own data centers, which tend to be housed in
nondescript warehouse-like buildings with no signs or markings. Making
matters more dificult, the United States and other nations with large
numbers of data centers have no single agency responsible for overseeing
them. The United States knows how many government data centers it
has—2,094 in 2010—but does not know how much energy they consume.
This does not just create a regulatory issue; it also creates the conditions
for disaster. As one technology and power industry consultant concluded,
“It's just not sustainable. They're going to hit a brick wall” (ibid.).
Public awareness is growing as pressure mounts from environmental
groups, especially Greenpeace. In 2010, the activist organization issued
a report on cloud computing that challenged the major providers to do a
much better job of taking into account environmental damage. Specii-
cally, it took Facebook to task for building a data center in central Oregon
serviced by a utility that primarily uses coal-ired power stations, the larg-
est source of greenhouse gas emissions in the United States (Greenpeace
International 2010). Greenpeace used the report to launch a campaign
dubbed Unfriend Coal, complete with a Facebook page that attracted
700,000 supporters and set a Guinness World Record for most comments
on the social-media site in a twenty-four-hour period. In 2011 the orga-
nization issued another study on cloud computing that provided speciic
details and graded cloud companies on their performance. This report
gave Facebook an F in “Infrastructure Siting” for the social-media com-
pany's continued reliance on coal-ired plants (Greenpeace International
2011). A year later, Facebook reached an agreement with Greenpeace by
pledging, among other things, to change its data plant siting policies.
Aside from the commitment to reduce dependency on coal-ired plants,
Facebook was short on speciics. But Greenpeace took this as a step in
the right direction.
The Greenpeace reports did not just call out Facebook for failure to
“like” the environment. No company fared especially well. In the 2011
report Twitter came out the worst, with F marks in all three categories of
transparency, a measure that included openness about its environmental
policies, infrastructure citing, and mitigation strategy. In keeping with
the secrecy with which new media companies operate, Amazon received