Recent data breaches have highlighted the vulnerability of our information. Derek Picot asks who is pilfering our details.
In January there was a further update from Marriott International about its compromised Starwood guest database. The press release declared a major intrusion into the system, which affected more than 383 million travellers (down from 500 million). In its original statement in November last year, it identified that the information theft started more than four years ago.
Marriott now advises that the following was possibly compromised: “Name, mailing address, phone number, email address, passport number, Starwood Preferred Guest account information, date of birth, gender, arrival and departure information, reservation date and communication preferences. For some, the information also includes payment card numbers and payment card expiration dates, but the card numbers were encrypted.”
DUTY OF CARE
Before the Marriott press release, travellers were already reeling from a data breach at British Airways between July and August last year. I had the tiresome experience of having to change all of my passwords and request new bank cards. Significantly inconvenienced, I sought compensation from the airline. After at least half a day’s aggravated angst, several mails, a couple of bank declarations and the cost of returning my payment card, I received a British Airways cheque for £3 in compensation, this being the only cost I could verify with a postage receipt. I had suggested an upgrade to my Executive Club status, but was told that this was impossible.
All of this reminded me that businesses that request our personal data need to improve considerably the systems that are designed to protect it, and to compensate us properly when, because of their inadequacy, they prove unable to keep it secure.
Reflecting on this responsibility and the increased exposure our lives have on the web, I wondered how long it had been since not just individual hackers but organs of state had been looking through my details. The UK’s National Cyber Security Centre, established two years ago, announced in its 2018 review that it defends the country from ten attacks a week.
In the early nineties, when I was general manager for a large hotel chain, I was approached by the British security services about an article they had read in a travel journal. The piece that had caught their attention concerned ITT (which owned Sheraton at the time) promoting a new concept for its hotel division. Its great leap forward was to utilise the booking system to pass guest information across continents. In this way, any hotel in the chain would know all about client preferences ahead of a stay.
What MI6 wanted to know was whether the system could follow someone worldwide that they were specifically interested in. Could they trace where they were going? Would the system let them know where they stayed, what they bought and – most important of all – who they called?
At the time, my level of computer literacy was at about the same as a mountaineer’s knowledge of deep-sea diving, so I was unable to answer the question instantly. After they left, I made further enquiries to see if it was indeed possible to track individual guests around the globe.
It became clear that, at the hotel level, only certain preferences would be passed on with an advance reservation. But the database held in the US had a wealth of information that was on the central system used for marketing and business performance measurement.
Today, we are in the strange situation where we are all far more aware of how much of our personal data is out there, while at the same time frantically typing even more of it into our social media profiles every day, whether providing updates to Facebook, or simply using Google Maps to find out where our hotel is located while unlocking our phones with our fingerprints.
No one knows who has stolen the Marriott/Starwood data, but given that international corporations such as these hotel groups dutifully record travellers’ itemised spending, preferences, habits and personal data, it may be a government-sponsored entity. Something of this magnitude that has been going on for several years might indicate an organisation of scale. MI6 clearly had an inkling back in the nineties how important all of this data transfer was going to become and how the internet would open the doors wide to an anonymous invasion of our privacy. We are all now finding out just what that entails.
Derek Picot has been a hotelier for more than 30 years, and is author of Hotel Reservations.
