As soon as Lars Ruiter stepped out of his car, he was confronted by a Microsoft security guard seething with anger, Morgan Meaker wrote for Wired. The security guards for data centers are specially trained to be aggressive and confrontational, so as to reinforce the air of secrecy and alienness of a data center in a local community. Ruiter, a Dutch local councilor, had parked in the rain outside a half-finished Microsoft data center that was rising out of flat North Holland farmland. The guard was not willing to listen to any local councilor expounding on the democratic rights of transparency and before Ruiter knew it, this data center security guard had his hands around the councilor’s throat.

Is there a more secretive empire in the world than Big Tech and its data centers? Big Tech realizes the power of data, the power it has over us when it has our data. It knows that if we knew about it even half of what it knows about us, then we would control Big Tech a lot more strictly than we do today.

There’s a common mantra in Big Tech when it has to respond to people who worry about all the data that it is sucking up about them: “If you’ve got nothing to hide, you’ve got nothing to worry about.” It’s such a disarming and innocent-sounding phrase. So comforting. However, does this mean that Big Tech, which hides its own data with fanatical religiosity, has something very big to hide? Yes, of course it does. Big Tech has an awful lot to hide.

Big Tech makes huge efforts to deny academic institutions or other research bodies access to data that would help highlight the harm it does. “Without better transparency and more reporting on the issue, it’s impossible to track the real environmental impacts of AI models,” Kate Crawford, a research professor at USC Annenberg, who specializes in the societal impacts of AI, told the Financial Times. According to Julia Velkova, an associate professor at the University of Helsinki, “These companies are unapproachable and largely disconnected from the places in which they are built. They refuse to talk to researchers or the public but instead communicate through press releases and YouTube videos, through the platforms that they own.”

Data center secrecy is rampant, deliberate and consistent. “When it comes to Google, what’s really striking is the lack of transparency and information when it comes to these projects,” said Sebastián Lehuedé, an expert in AI. How much water do US data centers use? “We don’t really know,” Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory research scientist Dr. Arman Shehabi explained. “I never thought it could be worse transparency than on the energy side, but we actually know less.” And Philip Boucher-Hayes, a journalist with RTE, the Irish national broadcaster, said: “We have been really bad at reporting data centres accurately, largely because the data centres refuse to be transparent. I spent months trying to get interviews with some of the hyperscale operators here. They refused.”