What Stays in Vegas (2 page)

The following year, the Berlin Wall fell. After allowing citizens free access to the West and its myriad of choices, East Germany and
its vast secret police apparatus quickly collapsed. Reunified Germany opened the Stasi files to those who had come under surveillance. More than a decade after my visit to Dresden I obtained my fifty-page dossier and learned the details of the Stasi's efforts to track me across the city.

Covert Stasi photo of the author taking notes in front of a hotel. Source: Germany's Federal Commissioner for the Stasi Archives.

Truth be told, for all their diligence, the Stasi did not really learn much. In the Internet era, thanks to meticulous data gathering from both public documents and commercial records, companies today know far more about typical consumers than the feared East German secret police recorded about me. Through public records, private firms know where you live and have lived, which neighbors live near you, your relatives, what property you own, what crimes you have committed. They know your age and telephone numbers. They can research your shopping habits and hobbies, and determine favorite Internet sites. Sometimes they know your ailments, even, perhaps, if you take Viagra. They might know where you are at any time through smart
phone apps and GPS locators. The aggregation of data makes finding out previously obscure information easy. All these years later, an Internet search quickly finds the home address and phone of the very same German hotel clerk who had to explain my visit to Stasi agents in 1988.

A line in front of an East Berlin bakery in 1988, a year before the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the end of Stasi monitoring. Source: Author photo.

Like East German agents quietly trailing their targets, many of today's data collectors remain unseen. Consumers may have a vague notion that companies gather their personal data, yet few have a clear idea about who collects it and how they use it. This book attempts to shine a light on some of the most interesting data gatherers, showing just how pervasive data gathering has become in everyone's daily life. Some firms let customers know they gather information about them and offer significant benefits in return. Others hide their names and whereabouts as they gobble up whatever facts they can.

Revelations about the US National Security Agency and its ability to gather information from our electronic communications illustrate the government's vast capabilities to amass information about us all. But experts believe that the US government does not keep detailed dossiers on every citizen with in-depth personal information accessible at the click of a mouse. Certainly, if the government has reason to gather the information, it has the ability to vacuum up a lot of data about us.

This book is not about those capabilities. It is about how data emerged to become the lifeblood of private industry, the elixir that fuels marketing efforts to compete and expand their businesses. The NSA and the FBI are not interested in the great majority of citizens. Nor do they profit from data. And, however imperfectly, they are subject to governmental, congressional, and judicial oversight. They can be called to account.

By contrast, private companies regularly assemble detailed individual profiles on millions upon millions of people with only minimal restrictions. Data collection has become widespread and extensive in recent years. Companies have fine-tuned efficient methods of gathering information about the lives of others that would make the Stasi green with envy. The land of the free, fueled by the spirit of free enterprise, has become the greatest data collector of all. If you live outside the United States, this trend is making its way to your door any day now, if it is not already in full bloom.
¹

And data collected by the private sector does end up in government hands through sophisticated snooping, the 2013–14 revelations about the NSA show. The NSA and law enforcement agencies—and presumably their foreign equivalents—tap into Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Internet providers, and others to scoop up vast troves of information about us, sometimes without the consent of the companies.

When I visited East Germany all those years ago, I was not producing a continuous stream of electronic data about my activities. If the Stasi wanted to know more, they had to follow people and monitor conversations the old-fashioned way, perhaps by having agents sitting for long hours around cafes and restaurants, or tapping into phones.
In the Internet era, why send ten agents out to trail someone when electronic footprints stored by private firms provide a far richer portrait of that person's activities?

Something as innocuous as playing the game Angry Birds can help the government gather more information on users through their smart phone apps, 2014 revelations from Edward Snowden's documents show.
²
The mobile app for that and other games acquires user data such as contact lists from Facebook, LinkedIn, and other sites as well as location data. US and British officials tapped into such information to learn more about potential terrorism or other suspects. Rovio, the maker of Angry Birds, issued a public statement in response suggesting the US and British governments also tap into Internet advertising networks, which monitor who visits what websites to help companies decide where to place their ad messages.

“The alleged surveillance may be conducted through third-party advertising networks used by millions of commercial websites and mobile applications across all industries. If advertising networks are indeed targeted, it would appear that no Internet-enabled device that visits ad-enabled websites or uses ad-enabled applications is immune to such surveillance,” Rovio said.
³

Governments also turn to data brokers and other companies to supplement their own files because the private-sector data collection is so extensive. Sometimes government agencies such as law enforcement pay for such data. In other cases, according to the NSA documents made public by Snowden, they just take it covertly. Clues to relationships, ailments, sexual orientation, religious and political affiliation, and other intimate details are easier than ever to discern, both for the private sector and for government.

Who are these people in the private sector gathering our data? This book will tell some of their stories. Overwhelmingly, they use our data for legitimate business purposes, essentially to market their products. Some consumers like the personalization that all this data allows, because it provides items or services of interest to them. Others bemoan their diminishing privacy even as they embrace the rich cornucopia of the Internet.

At the same time, there is a darker side. Some firms make money off the misery of others, and this book will tell some of these stories as well. Shaming has never been more profitable or easy. Sites promoting revenge porn, slanderous reviews or gossip, or arrest photos that shoot to the top of Internet searches strike many people as just plain wrong. The ever greater ability to assemble such information is something to be concerned about.

“You can reconstruct, like, my whole day—not just
my
whole day, but for everyone you can reconstruct at a very fine level of detail what they have been up to, what they are doing, and so on,” says Vitaly Shmatikov, a University of Texas computer scientist. “Of course, at the moment it requires aggregation of multiple databases and nobody is doing it—I hope. But the technical capability is there. So you've got to wonder what could come out of there.”

This book does not directly profile some of the biggest data hunters, such as Facebook, Google, Amazon, and other Internet giants. One reason is that their ever-evolving practices are widely and minutely chronicled on many websites, in the media, and in other books. Another is that their data gathering is often more obvious. If you share details about your life on Facebook or other social media, they will know lots about you. Google and Amazon are such major Internet presences that they have great insights into people's behaviors.

Yet these companies, especially Facebook and Google, return again and again in this book because they cast such a long shadow across the business of personal data.
Chapter 9
looks at some less obvious features of Facebook, such as how clues from your friends and “likes” can reveal intimate details about you. Facebook returns in
Chapter 11
, which discusses casino surveillance. Google searches and advertising play a vital role in the success of the people-search websites in
Chapters 6
and the mug-shot websites detailed in
Chapter 12
.

The Freedom of Old Las Vegas

After researching three editions of the Eastern Europe guidebook in the second half of the 1980s, I spent five years in Russia in the 1990s as a
correspondent. I arrived shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union, symbolized by the moment when protesters toppled the statue of the secret police founder in front of KGB headquarters. But despite the high hopes of many, the clumsy first steps toward democracy led to an economic depression, and many people lived in grim poverty in those early post-Soviet years. Life in the frigid Russian capital at the time often appeared gray and dreary.

One winter during those years I left the deep frost of Moscow and visited Las Vegas for the first time. The glow of the winter sun, the glare of the neon signs along the Strip, the energy of nonstop entertainment, the frenetic spending of money—the whole atmosphere dazzled me. In particular, I remember the opulence of Caesars Palace—its vast casino, endless shops and restaurants, its colorful history with legendary performers such as Frank Sinatra, the skimpy white togas of the waitresses.

In those years, I felt such freedom in returning to America. Communist and early post-Communist countries seemed a world apart. It was fascinating to spend time in that part of the world, but it always felt a bit strange to be a person of interest, someone whose activities attracted attention from others both seen and unseen. One breathed freely and easily on holiday back in the United States, a place where few cared or noted what you did.

In Las Vegas at that time casinos did not ask for my name or any other information about me. I did not sign up for a loyalty program, so the casino had no idea who I was. You put money on the table and they gladly accepted your business, no questions asked. Practiced dealers kept a keen eye on players and manually calculated which high-spending guests might deserve a free meal or room. Lower-end players came and went without garnering much attention. What happened in Vegas stayed in Vegas.

A lot has changed since then.

1

What Happens Here, Stays Here?

The Myth of Sin City

The September 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon thousands of miles away delivered a tough blow to Las Vegas too. After such a tragedy, vacationing in Las Vegas felt frivolous, even disreputable. Many feared Sin City, as a symbol of capitalist excess, could itself become a terrorist target.

Like a champion boxer hit by a stunning blow, Vegas stumbled before it came back roaring with its “What Happens Here, Stays Here” advertising campaign. One TV spot that captured the public imagination showed an attractive young woman flirting with a series of men; to each one she introduced herself by a different name. Another showed a group of women riding in a limo, giggling wildly about some adventure they had just enjoyed. Yet another advertisement opened with a church wedding as a pastor asked, “If anyone present has reason to believe these two should not be wed, let them speak now or forever hold their peace.” The camera panned slowly across the worried faces of bridesmaids and groomsmen. An awkward pause filled the church as friends and family looked around uneasily, until the pastor relieved the tension: “No one? Okay, moving on.” At the end of each advertisement appeared the slogan “What Happens Here, Stays Here.”