Everybody Does Know Your Name
When you go out for a nice dinner, or maybe just to get some groceries to make your own meal, do you want to go to a place where everybody knows your name, or do you want to remain anonymous to the world?
Of course everybody will know your name. You don’t have a choice.
Brett Martin, The Atlantic:
Much of the data collection has been justified in the name of customer service—a way to track allergies, preferences, birthdays, and so on, thus bringing technological efficiency to a job previously handled by a heavily notated reservation book or the encyclopedic mind of a gifted maître d’. “We try to build a database on everybody and get as much information as possible,” Vilkhu told me when I called him a few weeks after my dinner. His restaurant uses OpenTable, and he knew, for instance, which bartenders had served me, the friend who had joined me, that I had complimented the cocktail list and enjoyed the crawfish dumplings. This information, he assured me, was shared with the Kingsway’s sister restaurant but nobody else: “We just want to be able to curate the experience as best as we possibly can.”
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Links:
- The One Question I Can’t Stand at Restaurants, Brett Martin, The Atlantic
- Woman Caught by Sheng Siong’s Facial Recognition Tech After Shoplifting 12 Times Gets Week’s Jail, by Shaffiq Alkhatib, Straits Times