The CFPB did end up forwarding the complaint and I did notify the DoJ as well. I agree that they'll probably try to argue anything they can to deny responsibility.
Because I already sent a letter to multiple agencies about it and nothing was done, so the only recourse I have to get them to change their ways is to file it myself or find a class action attorney willing to do it.
Having a freeze is actually supposed to prevent any pull at all, which is why Experian has an option to unfreeze. The fraud alert is a separate action though that states you have been a victim of identity theft.
Although the situation is ideal for class action, federal law caps the penalty at $500,000 for class action and so depending on the number of class members the amount I'd get as a class representative is likely less than what I'd get in an individual case.
So you don't really care about others, just yourself. A class action, could gain you near nothing but cost Google millions, or you could gain 10k and google could lose 10k.
I am very glad the OP is pursuing action at all; it is far too easy to simply let violations of the law slide (and companies work hard to make it so). He deserves praise for that. The few of us who go through this stressful months or years-long journey deserve all the support we can give them. We should try to avoid giving petty, selfish critiques from the backseat.
Yeah that's incredibly selfish. Is the point to hit Google for acting antisocially and doing this same song and dance potentially with anyone, or just to get compensated for the brazen demands on your apparently extremely valuable time?
Where in Arizona specifically? Have they even decided? Did the government decide to pay for the factory and enroll their for-profit prisoners to work for $0.10/per hour, and divert the remaining water supply to the factory? Arizona seems like a terrible choice for a chip factory, unless they've selected an area that gets natural water... and there aren't many.
Hmm, my understanding was that fabs needed an initial supply of water, but then could cycle that same water for a long time.
A quick Google[0] suggests that they've only started doing this heavily pretty recently, but I'm guessing new fabs in Arizona will implement state of the art water-recycling.
That said, the numbers in this article suggest that 98% recycling would drop usage to the equivalent of ~6000 homes, which still feels significant.
Low seismic activity is the benefit of Arizona that I've seen cited in the past, which I'd guess outweighs the water sourcing issues.
That article is somewhat wrong. 10 million gallons of water is not enough for 300k households. It's maybe enough for 300k people. 10 million divided by 300k is 33 gallons. The average use per person even in urban areas is around 40 gallons per day - so that's generally ignoring outdoor irrigation. It's more like enough water for 200k-250k people.
So 2% of that is maybe around enough water for 5k people. Arizona has 7 million people. And residential doesn't even use most of Arizona's water.
Arizona is actually a good choice. It is geologically stable, doesn't suffer from natural disasters, is somewhat close to Silicon Valley, and has a large enough talent pool to staff TSMC's facilities.
Surely somewhere in the midwest would be more geologically stable and have plenty of access to water. Not sure the proximity to Silicon Valley makes any difference. It's not like factory workers are going to commute from California to Arizona.
Phoenix has long been a hub for semiconductor manufacturing, so it makes sense from the perspective of there is an existing skilled worker pool and supplier base. Motorola had large sites there, and Intel has a bunch of fabs and is building more in the area.
I believe the primary reason was tax-related, but the secondary reason is that there is already substantial personnel in the area who are experts in chip design and fabrication (Intel), with a strong pipeline for new talent from local universities for those skills.
Surprisingly, the area is also one of the largest Taiwanese communities in the U.S., which is a bonus for the engineers and their families who will be relocated from the "mothership".
Also, it's actually quite common for high-level Intel staff to fly back and forth from Portland and Phoenix. I am not sure if the same would be said about Taiwan and Arizona, but if they have staff in SV it wouldn't be too far-fetched.
Access to talent is a huge factor. One of the biggest obstacles of creating a US fab was the lack of access to cheap talent (in contrast to Taiwanese engineers that work long hours for relatively cheap money and are widely available - of course comparing to the US, in Taiwan they are among the highest earners).
Intel has tons of fabs in phoenix so TSMC can steal some of their employees. I think intel chose arizona because of the lack of natural disasters and tax incentives. The water is mostly reused so not really that big of a deal.
Data encryption can be decoupled from key encryption. Let's say I hash the content of a file, encrypt the file with its own hash, and then encrypt the hash with the user's password.
This way you can have deduplication of data, and only an attacker that knows the content of the file can decrypt the file, but since they already have the file, it does not matter.
Not only does it require login, but it is not like they are giving you full bandwidth. Good luck to anyone trying to do a lot of high-bandwidth downloads over an Xfinity guest network.
