WAL MART’S DATA BUNKER…
Behind the super center at 342 Commercial Lane near Jane, Missouri is Wal Mart’s data bunker. All businesses need to track sales and inventory. But Wally World wants to secretly record you as you try a new shade of lipstick. And sell the video to cosmetic companies.
From The Joplin Globe:
Behind a fence topped with razor wire just off U.S. Highway 71 is a bunker of a building that Wal-Mart considers so secret that it won’t even let the county assessor inside without a nondisclosure agreement.
The 125,000-square-foot building, tucked behind a new Wal-Mart Supercenter, is only a stone’s throw from the Arkansas line and about 15 miles from corporate headquarters in Bentonville, Ark.
There is nothing about the building to give even a hint that Wal-Mart owns it.
Despite the glimpses through the fence of manicured grass and carefully placed trees, the overall impression is that this is a secure site that could withstand just about anything. Earth is packed against the sides. The green roof — meant, perhaps, to blend into the surrounding Ozarks hills — bristles with dish antennas. On one of the heavy steel gates at the guardhouse is a notice that visitors must use the intercom for assistance.
What the building houses is a mystery.
Wal-Mart’s ability to crunch numbers is a favorite of conspiracy theorists, and its data centers are the corporate counterpart to Area 51 at Groom Lake in the state of Nevada. According to one consumer activist, Katherine Albrecht, even the wildest conspiracy buff might be surprised at just how much Wal-Mart knows about its customers – and how much more it would like to know.
“We were contacted about two years ago by somebody who runs a security company that had been asked in a request for proposals for ways they could link video footage with customers paying for their purchases,” Albrecht said. “Wal-Mart would actually be able to view photos and video of customers paying, say, for a pack of gum. At the time, it struck me as unbelievably outlandish because of the amount of data storage required.”
But Wal-Mart, according to a 2004 New York Times article, had enough storage capacity to contain twice the amount of all the information available on the Internet. For the technically minded, the exact amount was for 460 terabytes of data. The prefix tera comes from the Greek word for monster, and a terabyte is a trillion bytes, the basic unit of computer storage.
This is the Bentonvile Behemoth equivalent of Cheyenne Mountain. Do you feel safer now?
Here’s one comment on the Globe’s story (the rest are worth the read as well):
Waiting writes: You know the “real” Wal-Mart died with Sam. This monster cares nothing for the communities it invades, the rank & file employee or its customers who are headed for unemployment because their jobs are being shipped to China. That rumbling you hear is Sam Walton rolling in his grave. Remember that the closer to home you spend your money, the shorter trip it has back to your pocket. So go to that “Mom & Pop”– spend your money wisely. Be aware of your tax districts and where firms buy their wholesale products.
Data Center background:
At Wal-Mart, World’s Largest Retail Data Warehouse Gets Even Larger