I worked at a large CG film production company. The IT department serviced several productions with their own budgets and accounting. Their budgets had just two IT line items -- storage gigabytes and CPU hours. Few people in the productions had enough time or inclination to dig into details of support, backup, high bandwidth requirements, transaction costs, etc. They just assumed they would get the best available. Furthermore the IT departments spent considerable time and money on researching and testing “the best available”. The only way for the IT department to manage their internal budget was to take what they spent, and reverse engineer a number to charge productions for storage and CPU (which was of course about 10-20 times the off-the-shelf rate). This wasn’t a problem until budgets got severely squeezed and the storage and CPU market disparity became grossly apparent. This is apparently becoming a common problem. I’ve heard of lots of instances these days individuals and occasionally whole departments at big companies are “going rogue”, by using their own hardware or public cloud (Amazon EC2) resources -- just to avoid internal IT department policies.

This is becoming an increasingly common ethical theme -- Can real statistical information be used to benefit society without re-enforcing stereotypes or trampling individual rights? I lean heavily in the direction of using statistical information, but recognize the need for the public to become more sophisticated about interpreting. I categorically reject the one-sided fear mongering of articles such as this. On the contrary I find the ignoring available information by public officials to be stupid and irresponsible. Note that this topic is something like the argument that Michele Bachmann has used for people to boycott the census -- Let's not give our public officials statistical information because we're afraid they might misuse it.