What are other websites like edhelper.com?

What would a hotel be like if it gathered, stored, analyzed, and monetized sensitive information during guest stays, in an analogous manner to the way Facebook, Google and others websites currently treat the data of their users?

• Social and search websites are not the only companies with access to extremely sensitive information about their users. What would the analogous behavior look like in a more traditional business like a hotel where the occupants use intimate physical (rather than virtual) space provided by a for profit company? What would be the analogues of current policies for cookies, data retention, opt-out policies, privacy settings etc... in a hotel that followed commonplace practices found in social media and search?

• Answer:

  This isn't a good of a simile as you might imagine. But there are some overlaps. Differences: Posting of personal information on Facebook, Google+ and other social networks by users is both elective (they chose what to post) and intended to be broadcast to other people. What activities done at a hotel fit the same model? Perhaps the rental of the banquet room and speeches offered there, but that's about it. People do not engage in "intimate" activity on social networks. "Personal", I would agree, but not intimate. Best model of that is the use of one-to-one communication like private messages or email. Automated systems find words in the message and serve ads triggered by those words in Gmail, but there is no automated system that could do this with physical activity. After all, a message sent to another is digital data, which can be analyzed. There is no way to do this with intimate behavior in an automated way, so your model breaks down here. The online environment is two things, from the consumer's point of view: data sharing (reading the news, posting on forums, etc.) and marketplace (Amazon, Ebay, http://Walmart.com). Advertising by businesses on the internet points consumers at one of those two main mechanisms. That's what "monetizing" is on the internet. There are many fewer ways to monetize behavior inside a hotel. And due to the environment being closed, all monetizing just leads back to the hotel services. This would be much more like ads on Facebook just leading back to Facebook and not to external service providers or vendors. Since the freak-out factor is about outsiders being privy to private details, this model does not fit hotels. There are no ways for outsiders to become involved. Similarities Your activities on Google Search are about as anonymous as your presence in a hotel room. Yes, some staff will be able to identify video rentals and room service and phone calls with "Room 203"; just as Google Search can identify a search for "nude elf girls" with your IP address. But this is not directly tied to you as a person and in any case both business models keep that information secure so not even the alias is shared with other businesses. Both social networks and hotels rely on a good overall reputation in order to stay in business. A reputation for publicly airing what should be secret is detrimental to continued business. And both succeed at this fairly well. Surely they can't protect you from making your own activities on their "property" public yourself. If you leave the curtains open while meeting you mistress or make posts of your drunk party pics publicly, that's not really the management's fault.