What Stays in Vegas The following book review is, at best, muted in its "appreciation" for Adam Tanner's new book. However, hearing / seeing him on C-Span my impression was very favorable. He knows the subject and, more to the point, seems to be well aware of all the implications of massive and relentless data mining. Or of all business and maybe law enforcement implications. However, there are profound political implications as well. Data mining as we know it today renders libertarianism indefensible. It does so because the fundamental premise of libertarianism is that freedom makes saints of us all when, in fact, it is a Pandora's box that, for all of the good there is in personal freedom, that is only one side of the story. We need maximum freedom, hopefully this is an unarguable premise. But it is an absurdity to think that freedom can ever be more than part of what we need. We also need some kind of social order, a sense of common values, morality, sense of purpose, compassion, and still other such things, and we need protection against abuses -of which there are MANY. We need to understand that freedom also releases innumerable evils into the world for which libertarianism has no remedy. And yet this entire evil sub-system is inspired by the free market. That is, libertarianism is based on the utterly false premise that people who are totally free will be totally virtuous when, in fact, while some are virtuous, far too many become criminals because the opportunity to steal from others is too great to resist. There are no regulations that matter, no common code of ethical behavior, and no safeguards from predators. Mr Tanner is well informed, provides all kinds of information to think about, and -without realizing it- provides all the insight anyone could want to demolish libertarianism. So it seems to me Billy ----------------------------------------------------- NYT Leaving Money and Privacy on the Table ‘What Stays in Vegas,’ by Adam Tanner
By _JANET MASLIN_ (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/m/janet_maslin/index.html) AUG. 27, 2014 “What Stays in Vegas” is a very far cry from what it promises to be. Adam Tanner’s ostensible objective is to reveal big secrets about how Las Vegas casinos, notably those owned by _Caesars Entertainment_ (https://www.caesars.com/corporate/about-us.html) , collect and use data that customers drop when they visit, just as they drop money. Surely, there’s something sexier about this than there is about the way Amazon analyzes you based on your purchases. Surely there’s something about gambling that makes it different from surfing the web. Not exactly. Mr. Tanner, a fellow at the _Institute for Quantitative Social Science_ (http://www.iq.harvard.edu/) at Harvard and a former Reuters bureau chief, spends a lot of time covering familiar ground. And not all of it is in Nevada. He starts at Harvard Business School, where Gary Loveman joined the faculty at 29 and became known for an article about the financial value of customer satisfaction. As part of his job, he trained executives from Harrah’s, the casino giant. A few years later, he left academia to become Harrah’s chief operating officer and moved to Las Vegas. He may have been the only guy in town who used words like “stochastic” and “vitiate” in conversation. Harrah and Caesars have since melded into Caesars Entertainment, and Mr. Loveman is one of Mr. Tanner’s primary sources. Mr. Loveman’s development of a loyalty program for Caesars’ best customers has been a success, but it hardly seems revelatory, at least as Mr. Tanner describes it. They get coupons and trips and a special lounge and reduced prices at buffets; they get free chips as an incentive to show up frequently. Caesars knows a lot about them. The biggest issue this book addresses is how and when that information should be used. A lot of “What Stays in Vegas” is about the data digging or online advertising outfits that might sell Caesars information about its customers. These businesses span a wide spectrum, from super-sleazy to merely profit-motivated. At the “creepy” end of things (this word comes up fairly often, with good reason) are blackmail sites like Instant Checkmate, which has sent out messages like this: “RISK ALERT: Very Negative Information Was Added To Your Online File (See what it was).” Then there is _bustedmugshots.com_ (http://bustedmugshots.com/) , which posts mug shots to amuse and entertain an online audience, no matter how much harm this inflicts on the people in the pictures. Kyle Prall, who started the site, has no trouble justifying its ethics to Mr. Tanner (“It’s a public record: It belongs to the public”) even though Mr. Prall is a felon. What does this have to do with Las Vegas? Not much, though Mr. Tanner finds a way to cycle back to Caesars at the end of each chapter somehow. Among his better digressions is discovering that some Internet sites post pictures of attractive management teams that don’t really exist. When he tried to contact the attractive spokeswoman for Instant Checkmate, whose name was given as Kristen Bright, he discovered that workers at the company had never seen her. Through some fancy footwork possible only in the Internet age, and with the hired help of a background data broker site, he did a Google image search on her face, traced it to a picture on a blog, learned that she was named Ann and located her through a job she’d held. Not surprisingly, she knew nothing about how her photo had been used. “Geez, if they would have asked, I could have sold a better photo!” she said. Again, no Vegas connection here. And there’s no news in Mr. Tanner’s overriding thought that the Internet’s destruction of privacy is dangerous, unmonitored and everywhere. The casino business seems innocent and squeaky-clean compared with many of the other things discussed here. For one thing, until recently, it relied on cash, which is cumbersome, untraceable and not a useful data source at all. Now that gamblers in Nevada can use prepaid cash cards, places like Caesars know more about what they eat, how much they spend, and whether they’ve bought souvenir T-shirts from _“The Hangover”_ (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1119646/) movies — shot at _Caesars Palace_ (http://www.caesarspalace.com/?source=PSx5x22438&site=google&act=LAV&cmp=LAV_ht tp://www.caesarspalace.com/) and now a theme for its slot machines, “in an example of life imitating art.” Among the more alarming points brought up here is that data analysis can extrapolate far more about things like sexual orientation and health conditions than it used to. Mr. Tanner demonstrates how easy it is to find a person ’s medical records with only a birth date and a ZIP code. As for sexual orientation, thank social networking sites for that: The “likes” on Facebook are fodder for Vegas data crunchers, who think that a man who likes Britney Spears is more apt to be gay than one who likes Shaquille O’Neal. Mr. Loveman, now chairman, chief executive and president of Caesars, has had to face ethical decisions about how much personal probing his business should do in order to remain competitive and where the invasion of privacy begins. At the end of the book, Mr. Tanner emphasizes the point that data is valuable, and that we should know what we’re giving away. That issue has already been brilliantly explored by Jaron Lanier in _“Who Owns the Future?,”_ (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/06/books/who-owns-the-future-by-jaron-lanier.h tml) a book not included in this one’s somewhat dated bibliography. (Actual entries: David Ogilvy’s 1997 autobiography and Vance Packard’s 1957 “ The Hidden Persuaders.”) But Mr. Tanner does include a helpful appendix listing specific ways to guard your privacy, block the sale of private information, encrypt personal documents and more. Here’s a radical one: If you’d like to make a purchase that’s no one’s business, just go to the store. And pay in cash. WHAT STAYS IN VEGAS The World of Personal Data — Lifeblood of Big Business — and the End of Privacy as We Know It By Adam Tanner -- -- Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community <[email protected]> Google Group: http://groups.google.com/group/RadicalCentrism Radical Centrism website and blog: http://RadicalCentrism.org --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. 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