Leaving privacy on the table

The book's objective is to reveal secrets about how Las Vegas casinos, notably those owned by Caesars Entertainment, collect and use data that customers drop when they visit

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, 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 analyses you, based on your purchases. Surely there's something about gambling that makes it different from surfing the web. Not exactly. Tanner, a fellow at the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard and a former Reuters bureau chief, spends 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 in Las Vegas.

Harrah and Caesars have since melded into Caesars Entertainment, and Loveman is one of Tanner's primary sources. Loveman's development of a loyalty program for Caesars' best customers has been a success, but it hardly seems revelatory. 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 are blackmail sites like Instant Checkmate, which has sent out messages like this: "RISK ALERT: Very Negative Information Was Added To Your Online File." Then there is bustedmugshots.com, which posts mug shots to amuse an online audience, no matter how much harm this inflicts on the people in the pictures.

What does this have to do with Las Vegas? Not much, though 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.

Again, no Vegas connection here. And there's no news in Tanner's overriding thought that the Internet's destruction of privacy is dangerous and unmonitored. The casino business seems 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 movies .

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. 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. Loveman, now chairman, chief executive and president of Caesars, has had to face ethical decisions about how much personal probing his business should do and where the invasion of privacy begins.

At the end of the book, Tanner emphasises 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?, a book not included in this one's somewhat dated bibliography. But he does include a helpful appendix listing specific ways to guard your privacy, block the sale of private information and more.

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