Data Mining and the End of Privacy as We Know It

The NSA may be invading our privacy, but so are American companies. Retailers, social media, and other firms are gathering data on individuals with little oversight from anyone. Adam Tanner tells how the Las Vegas casino Caesars Entertainment tracks the activities of the overwhelming majority of gamblers—they know what games they like to play, what foods they like to eat for breakfast, when they prefer to visit, who their favorite hostess might be—and the casino uses this information to keep gamblers coming back for more. Tanner’s book What Stays in Vegas: The World of Personal Data—Lifeblood of Big Business—and the End of Privacy as We Know It looks at what it means to live in an age when our personal information is harvested and aggregated whether we like it or not, and how that information is being used.