> "For instance, maybe the hotel will find out the guest is an advocate for LGBT rights, in which case the staff can personalize the welcome amenity by including a magazine they would identify with. Something unique and personal that says, 'This is just for you.'"
Aside from finding this trend creepy, I find it incredibly annoying as well.
Time Warner Cable insists on sending me two (mailed) ads a month advertising Hindi-language television. It's easy for any reasonably attentive person to guess my ethnic background; my last name is very identifiable - sort of the Indian equivalent of something like 'Schwartzbaumstein'. Though, in the case of Time Warner, they probably just bought that information from someone else. Either way, I never opted to give them that information, and that's for a reason - I have no interest in identifying myself in terms of my ethnicity when it comes to my cable company.
I don't have cable (just Internet), so I'm not interested. I wouldn't be interested even if I did, because I'm from a part of the country that doesn't speak Hindi. And lastly, just because you (correctly) discerned my country of origin (or in this case, someone's sexual orientation), who are you to use that information to solicit me?
I don't find this kind of "personalization" appealing or endearing. I find it incredibly degrading and objectifying.
> "We knew very little about her before she checked in, so we searched for her online and discovered she had a dog named Bo," the rep says. "When she arrived, there was a little doggy gift waiting in her room, with a note card that said 'Bo misses you.' " Creepy? Cute? You be the judge.
That could go horribly wrong if the dog had died since the information was posted online.
Did you watch the Oscars? The producers and network know your age, sex, race, location, education and income levels, courtesy your cable company. They can use that data to fine-tune the advertisements they purchase for next year's Oscars. They can't match a name to it but there is Bayesian analysis that can match a cable box UUID to detailed demographic data on the owner of that box with high confidence.
Oh, and hotels are particularly dangerous: this article describes the behavior of hoteliers in your own nation. When travelling abroad, you can basically expect to be spied on, 007-style, if you work in certain sensitive professions. At one workplace I was shown hidden-camera video taken by a government contractor abroad in China: within minutes of his departure, a swarm of hotel staff descended upon his room to plant bugs. One of them found the hidden camera and asked the others: "Is this our camera? Or his?"
> Cranks and paranoiacs will surely see all this probing and profiling as a sign of the apocalypse, or at least a serious incursion into their privacy.
Luckily for most of us, most of the hotels I stay in couldn't give a shit to Google for preferences.
Most hotels are too busy trying to get those extra few dollars for their overpriced, shitty wifi, the crappy breakfasts, laundry and all those other overpriced services.
This. Sure, St. Regis Bora Bora can Google each guest to build an individual profile, but that's because staying there starts at $1000/night. Your neighborhood Motel 6? Not so much.
Even more fun is when you stay in a hotel in China and are identified as being with a tech conference, work in technology or science, or are at all government or defense related.
It's like a super low budget, technology enabled version of cold war spycraft. Leave a bait laptop in your room, with some markings on screws or other panels, or a hidden video recorder somewhere, and you're likely to see hotel staff come in, Encase dump the drive, and potentially either do on-site surgery (CMOS BIOS reset) or take it away for hardware tampering (apparently to the level of hardware component swaps...).
I was a (relatively) early adopter of the world wide web. Once upon a time, if you googled my name, every single result would be me. That was over a decade ago. Since then, I have become a bit of an e-recluse. And, other people with the same name as me have showed up online, including a professional poker player in England who seems to dominate the top several PAGES of results. I am afraid that if a hotel tried to do this to me, they would get it very very wrong.
Indeed, as ececconi says, it is taking extreme examples. Maybe at the Bora Bora St. Regis these exercises make economic sense, but at a Marriott Courtyard that caters to government contractors? Probably not.
Here, here. Part of my relief on finishing this article was that I'm not loaded enough for hotels to care what I want. I'll be lucky to land a floor with a working ice machine.
I saw a scary presentation by Adam Laurie about 5 years back where he hacked in to a hotel server via infra-red in the room. The infra-red offered full KVM and the ability to see all guest's personal information, as well as see what they were watching on their screen (ie. reliably detect their presence or lack of in a given room, remotely). I doubt that era of systems have all been upgraded.
I always take my iPad and watch things on that. Do people really use the TV's in the rooms? I certainly don't want to pay over the top prices for things I can get elsewhere.
Aside from finding this trend creepy, I find it incredibly annoying as well.
Time Warner Cable insists on sending me two (mailed) ads a month advertising Hindi-language television. It's easy for any reasonably attentive person to guess my ethnic background; my last name is very identifiable - sort of the Indian equivalent of something like 'Schwartzbaumstein'. Though, in the case of Time Warner, they probably just bought that information from someone else. Either way, I never opted to give them that information, and that's for a reason - I have no interest in identifying myself in terms of my ethnicity when it comes to my cable company.
I don't have cable (just Internet), so I'm not interested. I wouldn't be interested even if I did, because I'm from a part of the country that doesn't speak Hindi. And lastly, just because you (correctly) discerned my country of origin (or in this case, someone's sexual orientation), who are you to use that information to solicit me?
I don't find this kind of "personalization" appealing or endearing. I find it incredibly degrading and objectifying.