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…