Download What Stays in Vegas: The World of Personal Data - Lifeblood of Big Business - and the End of Privacy as We Know It AudioBook Free
The greatest threat to personal privacy today is not the NSA, but good-old American companies. Internet giants, leading sellers, and other organizations are voraciously gathering data with little oversight from anyone. In NEVADA, no company has learned the worthiness of data much better than Caesars Entertainment. Many thousands of enthusiastic clients pour through the ever-open entrances of these casinos. The trick to the company's success lies in their one unrivaled advantage: they know their clients intimately by traffic monitoring the activities of the mind-boggling majority of gamblers. They know exactly what games they prefer to play, what foods they enjoy for breakfast, when they favor to go to, who a common hostess might be, and exactly how to keep them coming back for much more. Caesars' dogged data-gathering methods have been so successful they have grown to be the world's most significant casino operator, and also have inspired companies of all kinds to ramp up their own data mining in the expectations of increasing their targeted marketing efforts. Some do that themselves. Some rely on data agents. Others clearly enter a moral gray zone which should make American consumers deeply uncomfortable. We reside in an age when our personal information is gathered and aggregated whether we enjoy it or not. Which is growing a lot more problematic for those businesses that choose not to take part in more intrusive data gathering to compete with those that do. Tanner's timely caution resounds: Yes, there are benefits to the free move of all this data, but there's a dark, unregulated, and dangerous netherworld as well.
