SALT LAKE CITY — The saying goes, 'Without data, you're just another person with an opinion.'
But with the onslaught of data centers, nearly 4,300 and counting across the country, there’s plenty of data to go around. Even so, many opinions about them still stand.
But what is a fact is that data centers act as a thread to all our technology.
“For the most part, what goes on inside a data center is everything you do in your day-to-day life on any of your connected devices, whether that’s your smartphone, whether that’s your laptop, anything that touches the cloud is actually happening inside a data center,” says Patrick Hedger, the director of policy for NetChoice.
So how is our information that’s housed in data centers utilized on a day-to-day basis? Some of those ways might not come as a surprise.
Why data centers are increasingly moving into rural Utah communities:
“A good example would be a retailer connecting directly to a bank inside the data center," says Austin Springs, director of operations for DataBank. "It does not have to go to the internet, so the chance of the information getting out is almost zero.”
“You lose your phone, or it’s stolen, you’re able to go and get a new phone and all of that information is backed up, and you haven’t really lost anything," says Hedger. "So in terms of the consumer convenience and security, data centers are the best way we know how to do this right now.”
But there are examples of consumer data use that get a little more specific.
An investigation by Consumer Reports, More Perfect Union and Groundwork Collaborative released last year took a look at how Instacart used AI pricing to inflate grocery bills.
Massive Utah data centers are drawing scrutiny, but smaller ones have been around for decades:
How did Instacart do it?
“Personalized pricing, which is also known as surveillance pricing, is when a retailer or a company is using something about you specifically," says Grace Gedye, a senior policy analyst for Consumer Reports. "So it might be your search history, it could be the type of device you’re using, maybe your real-time location, like where you’re going with your phone throughout the day, inference about your family size or income, etc., to change the price you see, perhaps based on their inferences about your willingness to pay.”
Gedye's focus as a policy analyst is artificial intelligence.
During the Instacart investigation, the collaborators solicited 437 volunteers from across the country to participate in the investigation.
Those volunteers were divided into four groups.
During a video meeting for each group, the volunteers simultaneously shopped on Instacart with the same baskets of 18 to 20 goods from the same retailers: Target and Safeway.
What they found was telling.
“They would look up the prices for each of these items and take a screenshot, and it would get recorded and researchers would go through and analyze all those screenshots and all those prices to see when people were looking at the same store at the same time at the same product, were they seeing the same price or were they seeing different prices?" says Gedye. "For 75% of those products, we found that people were being charged different prices for the same product at the same time at the same store. In some cases, people saw as many has five different prices for the exact same product at the same store.”
After a final test a couple months later, they found more of the same with other retailers including Albertsons, Costco, Kroger and Sprouts.
The long and short of it, post this investigation, Consumer Reports says Instacart stopped using technology that let grocery retailers charge shoppers different prices for the same groceries at the same time.
Instacart denies that its price experiments use any personal or demographic data and says customers are randomly assigned to price testing cohorts by product category and location.
“People have this expectation that for the same product, at least at the same time, people are going to see the same price and when that isn’t the case, it feels unfair and then they’re upset," says Gedye. "I think this is part of the reason we’re seeing such momentum politically for pieces of legislation that take aim at that practice.”
It all comes back to the data.
Kept in many centers, used for many different purposes.
How is it used? That's still evolving.