About this item
The greatest threat to privacy today is not the NSA, but good-old American companies. Internet giants, leading retailers, and other firms are voraciously gathering data with little oversight from anyone.In Las Vegas, no company knows the value of data better than Caesars Entertainment. Many thousands of enthusiastic clients pour through the ever-open doors of their casinos. The secret to the company’s success lies in their one unrivaled asset: they know their clients intimately by tracking the activities of the overwhelming majority of gamblers. They know exactly what games they like to play, what foods they enjoy for breakfast, when they prefer to visit, who their favorite hostess might be, and exactly how to keep them coming back for more.
About the Author
Adam Tanner is one of America's leading experts on privacy and the commercialization of personal information. He is the author of "What Stays in Vegas: The World of Personal Data-Lifeblood of Big Business-and the End of Privacy as We Know It" (named by the Washington Post as one of 50 notable works of non-fiction in 2014) and "Our Bodies, Our Data: How Companies Make Billions Selling Our Medical Records" (Jan. 2017) .
He is Writer in Residence at Harvard University's Institute for Quantitative Social Science and the 2016-17 C.W. Snedden Chair in Journalism at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.
He served as a Reuters news agency correspondent from 1995-2011, including as bureau chief for the Balkans (2008-2011) , San Francisco bureau chief (2003-2008) , and correspondent in Berlin, Moscow and Washington D.C. He has appeared on CNN, Bloomberg TV, MSNBC, CNBC, NPR, the BBC and VOA, written for magazines including Scientific American, Forbes, Fortune, Time, MIT Technology Review and Slate, and lectured across the United States and in Canada, Britain, the Netherlands, Germany, Hong Kong, Macao, Indonesia, Thailand, Singapore, Japan, and India.
