This Washington Post story on surveillance in Vegas is worth reading. It would be easy to dismiss the article as a so-so attempt at slightly paranoid public-interest journalism. But then you get to thinking that surveillance and privacy are likely to be hot-button issues in any future politics. Consider this section of the article:
Under the elegant chandeliers at Caesars Palace, 10,000 people a day willingly give up personal information - name, address, birthday - and allow their gambling habits to be tracked so they can win free hotel rooms and show tickets. In nearly a decade, 40 million have signed up for Harrah's Total Rewards loyalty card. Harrah's Entertainment, owner of Ceasars Palace and the industry leader in data mining for marketing, can then customize the gambler's experience. A guest celebrating her birthday might insert her card in a slot machine and be surprised by a promotions manager bearing a birthday card and a cookie. 'It's really about, how do we convince these people to be more loyal and give them a sense of "We know who you are,"' said David W. Norton, senior vice president at Harrah's. Guests may or may not see that as a good thing. In December 2003, faced with a warning that terrorists were about to attack Las Vegas, the FBI asked hotels, rental-car agencies and airlines for customer data. Some balked, but others produced the data, sometimes voluntarily, sometimes when presented with a subpoena. The data sweep turned up no leads. One gambler who was there at the time said he approved of the tactic. 'The only people who have anything to worry about are the people who have something to hide,' said Dale Weinstein, a Los Angeles media market consultant sitting at a Caesar's Palace slot machine where he had just won a S2,000 jackpot. But for David Richardson, a real estate inspector from in Upstate New York, the data gathering crossed a line. 'They have no right to get in your shorts,' he said, strolling between casinos. 'It's all about gathering personal information, which I'm not so crazy about the government knowing. It's none of their business.'
Billions of people volunteer personal information every day through various transactions, applications, and conversations. I think most people are comfortable with such voluntary breaches of privacy. What bothers some is the potential use to which this volunteered information is put. Today people remain largely ignorant of those uses. It seems to me that as surveillance technology becomes more and more advanced, the uses to which that technology is put will become more and more contentious. What's more uncertain is which political party will benefit from such debates.