
What your hotel knows about you - evo_9
http://www.cnn.com/2013/02/26/travel/what-your-hotel-knows/index.html?hpt=hp_c2
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eurleif
> "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.

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bitwize
Data mining is the new normal.

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?"

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MereInterest
> 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.

Well, that is certainly an unbiased sentence.

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tnuc
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.

~~~
jpatokal
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.

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rdl
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...).

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goodcanadian
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.

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ececconi
I feel like this article is taking extreme examples and making it seem like it
is the norm.

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chimeracoder
> "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.

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prawn
"So when the bellman casually inquires, "Where are we off to today, folks?" no
doubt your reply will be fed into your ever-expanding profile."

Bellman with Google Glass in the future? Eek.

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cafard
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.

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josscrowcroft
What I expected: _Hotels use big data and machine learning to analyse your
every move_

What I got: Hotels look you up on Google before you arrive. Whoa.

Also, this is really poorly written, which is a shame because it's potentially
interesting as-is.

~~~
petsos
How is collecting data about a few thousand people big data?

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hartator
This guy doesn't seem to have ever stay @ a day inn or something!

~~~
intopieces
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.

~~~
hartator
From your profile, we have seen that you've complained about cockroachs. This
time, we will be more careful on our selection of bugs.

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davidroberts
Yeah, I believe it. The fleas in that hotel in Miami had obviously been
instructed on my preferred places and times for donating blood.

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contingencies
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.

~~~
hnriot
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.

~~~
joezydeco
Laurie hacked the system available on the room TVs that show your current bill
and let you check out, etc. Nothing to do with internet access.

