16 October 2013 (11:39 UTC-07 Tango)/11 Dhu’l-Hijja 1434/24 Mehr 1391/12 Ren-Xu (9th month) 4711

The United States government and ebay have things in common: They both partner to collect your personal data, and their major collection centers are based in the Mormon dominated state of Utah.  But ebay has built the World’s first energy independent collection center, according to ebay itself and Bloom Energy.

Don’t forget ebay has a data center in Arizona called Project Mercury.  In Las Vegas, Nevada, there is what’s being called the largest privately run data collection center in the World.  It’s operated by a company called Switch.  It’s users are “ebay, Google, Sony, Zappos, HP, Cisco, Activision, Intuit, University of Phoenix, Yahoo, MySpace, eHarmony, Sony or Disney, or any of those guys who have games on the internet.”-Rob Roy, Switch

Switch continues to expand its Las Vegas operations and will eventually have 2.2 million square feet (670560 square meters) of data center space (currently they’re just over 400-thousand square feet)!  The state of Nevada was influenced to give the green light to data collection centers by a report from Brookings Mountain West.  A former executive of Switch has started his own data collection company called Cobalt.

ebay’s Topaz data stealing center (created with help from Dell and Hewlett Packard) in Utah is located in South Jordan (just south of Salt Lake City).  It’s not new, but the fact that it is now independent of the power grid is.  It’s powered by Bloom Energy’s fuel cells, solar panels, and a heat waste recovery system is also being built for the center, to insure 100% power grid independence.  ebay’s own video presentation about the collection center states the center was built in partnership with federal and state governments!

ebay has also innovated a way that company (government?) officials can watch your data stream in real time.  It’s called Digital Service Efficiency (DSE).  According to Network Computing it appears to the user as “….a dashboard that displays power load, number of users, energy supplied and other measures of IT effectiveness along with the amount of revenue generated per user, cost of employing that user, carbon footprint and other measures of business activity.”

(note that in the above quote, as a “user” of ebay you are considered an ’employee’, not a client)

According to ebay officials, this real time data dashboard (DSE) is intended to increase the number of transactions per kilowatt hour.  ebay also claims that they save millions of dollars in electrical power usage every time they increase the efficiency of their data collection process.

ebay says it will share any non-specific company DSE techologies with other companies, that are part of a consortium known as The Green Grid.  The current board members of The Green Grid are AMD, Cisco, Dell, EMC2, Emerson, Google, HP, IBM, Intel, Microsoft and Schneider.

By the way, ebay’s new massive data collection center is just north of the federal government’s massive data collection center, located on the Utah Army National Guard’s Camp Williams.

The Salt Lake Tribune reported that ebay got a $38.2 million tax break from Utah, for its new customer service center in Draper!   (as a ebay user I say Utah taxpayers got ripped!)

According to ebay, their motivation to build massive data storage centers is to reduce “environmental impacts”!  Hey, if you weren’t collecting individual’s data you wouldn’t need data centers at all!  Why don’t you try that for saving the environment?

(the correct official new spelling for ebay is all lower case.  why can’t you mainstreamer newsies get it right?)