DINT #73 - Racist Abuse at Data Center Construction Sites: Why It Persists and What to Do About It
Plus: The College Board shares your SAT scores with Facebook and TikTok
News Briefs
The College Board Shares Student Data with TikTok, Facebook and Others (Gizmodo)
DHS Uses AI to Discover Intent and Feelings of Subjects in Photos and Video (404 Media exclusive)
Google Increases Gmail Security with 2FA Challenges for the Filter Setting (Ars Technica)
IRS Cracks Down on Cryptocurrency Tax Reporting (Reuters)
Bait-and-Switch Tactics Leave Female Gig Workers Out of Bonuses and Guaranteed Payouts (Rest of World)
“Without intentional counterbalance, inequities of power are inevitable,” wrote Valerie Montgomery Rice, MD, in a viewpoint article in the Journal of American Medical Association (JAMA) website.
Friday Feature
The cloud isn’t actually invisible or wispy and light. It’s actually a network of servers, fiber optic cables, undersea cables, nodes, semiconductor chips, data centers, electrical stations, gas-powered generators, water management systems, and everything in between.
Digital infrastructure is only digital 10 to 20% of the time. Construction and engineering drive digital infrastructure. Both industries are male dominated and employ mainly people of European descent.
That can create unwelcoming atmospheres for those who don’t fit into that demographic. A manager once said to me, “People are uncomfortable with you because you represent change.” And that’s what many see when a Black or Brown person comes onto a digital infrastructure (data center, smart car manufacturing) construction site.
Google Data Center Construction Site Racism Nets $1.2M Class Action Verdict
In May, one of the data center industry’s go-to construction companies (Whiting-Turner) paid $1.2 million to settle a lawsuit brought by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) on behalf of Black former workers. The workers endured racial harassment and retaliation when they spoke up about the injustice.
The Black workers filed a complaint with the EEOC which in turn filed suit against Whiting-Turner. The worksite is in Tennessee for the purpose of building Google’s data center there.
Google had no comment on the EEOC ruling, as is the practice of many Big Tech firms with racist incidents at their data center construction sites.
Meta Data Center Construction Sites Feature Nooses, Racist Graffiti, and Verbal Abuse
For instance, construction workers at a data center build for Meta in Altoona, Iowa hung a noose in an area where the site’s three Black workers would easily come in contact with it. This happened on Juneteenth 2020 (just one month after the murder of George Floyd gained worldwide attention for the state of race relations in the U.S.).
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