What your hotel knows about you

> "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.

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?"

> 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.

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.

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.

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

> "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.

"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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.