Slashdot Mirror
Take Big Brother on Vacation with You
An anonymous reader writes "Book a flight or a rental car, and that trip and your companions' names, where you stay, what you eat, your bed size preference, in-room movie preference, and just about anything else you get a receipt for is etched in stone."
Keeping the data forever would be against the law (Data Protection Act) in the UK and I suspect also in rest of Europe.
Several years ago, PBS had a show on various companies that collect data on consumers and the methods they use. A few points they discussed:
1) There are companies that send employees to courthouses to collect data from public records, e.g., real estate sales, births and deaths, etc. (For anyone with a child, this is why you magically gets the first birthday photo coupons in the mail. For home buyers, this is why you get coupons from the local Home Depot.)
2) Everyone is aware of data collected thru credit cards, but there are other sources. Everytime you use your frequent buyer card at the grocey store, they know who you are and what you buy. Similar things occur with similar cards at other stores.
3) There are companies that specialize in correlating the above data with census records. Publically available census records provide average income and other information for each zip code in the U.S.
Add this to airline databases, and credit card info, and you have your life history.
Here's how it works: you go to a travel agent, or get online, and book a vacation. The travel agent (person or web server) handling it queries you for: 1) where you want to go; 2) when you want to go; 3) what kind of hotel you want to stay in; 4) what kind of car you want to rent; 5) how many (and what age) people are travelling with you, etc.
In the case of Sabre (and probably the others quoted in the article), the flights, hotels and cars are all available in the one res system. So, the agent queries Sabre for flight information, finds something appropriate, marks it in the PNR. Then (s)he checks out hotels, finds something appropriate, marks it in the PNR. Etc, etc, etc. The airline isn't recording the info, the travel agent is...
What you can do to avoid such link-ups is to book everything separately - a big PITA, but possible.
BTW, Sabre doesn't record the PNR forever - once your trip is over, the PNR space is recycled. Some information is forwarded to the billing systems and from there is aggregated into trending data that's held online for two years. The trending data allows the data users to determine on a daily basis what's happening in the travel industry - where planes are needed, where they're flying half-empty, etc.
An example of what can happen when the government collects too much information can be seen in Terry Gilliam's movie Brazil.
Back when I first saw this, I thought "yeah, right" but now it actually seem possible.
Mistakes WILL be made.
If you opt for a car with a navigation system from a rental company, some use the GPS location to locate the car if stolen. Great. But here's what you DON'T know: Those same systems can record your conversations while inside the car. This is no lie - government employees have been told to watch what they say inside of rental cars while traveling on official business.
-- (Score:i, Imaginary)
And after reading the first link on the google query, one of those people RDNS'd the IP and found it was someones DSL, not the evil government. Sorry to disappoint.