Word: credit-card
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...village visibility. As the journalist Kevin Kelly has noted, the old-fashioned, small-town lack of privacy was symmetrical. You knew the people who were watching you, and you could watch them back. These days, you are not on a first-name basis with the computers that track your credit-card purchases or your Web browser's wanderings--or with the people who, for all you know, can access those computers. It's this sense of a distant, cloaked observer that's really eerie...
...years, of course, everyone from insurance adjusters to credit-card companies has made money swapping consumer profiles like baseball cards. But the Web is bringing this great American pastime to new levels of invasive splendor. Ironically, one of the most attractive features of the Net--its ability to customize content instantly--morphs smoothly into one of its most sinister: the ability to monitor who you are and what you're doing online, even...
...rumors, which have appeared in print with no evidence to back them up, helped persuade lawyers for the state Democratic Party to take a cue from Starr and file a Freedom of Information Act request last June demanding the official schedule of Beasley and his key aides, including state credit-card receipts, e-mail, computer records and recorded phone messages. "We need to find out what he has been doing for the past four years and whether the private material he will not release is indicative of extramarital contact," says a senior Democratic Party strategist. Perhaps following the Clinton model...
...Federal offices tracking student aid will be reorganized, replacing a number of separate systems with a new streamlined program modeled after the efficiency and openness of a credit-card company...
Meanwhile, by selling miles to credit-card and phone companies, the airlines together generate $1.5 billion in extra revenues each year on their frequent-flyer programs, according to Petersen. And since frequent flyers often stick to their preferred carrier, even when cheaper fares are available elsewhere, they allow the airlines to charge higher fares, saving the industry some $4 billion annually. Thanks to tight restrictions on frequent-flyer awards, most seats given away by airlines are those that would otherwise go unfilled, costing the airlines next to nothing...