Knowing your favorite drink is obviously not on par with knowing that you're on thin ice with your HR department, and it is the corporation, not the flight crew, who has been (possibly) invasive. To me, it feels like a bit of a transgression whenever a business goes out of their way to find info about me without just asking.
If you want to know something about me, just ask. I might refuse to answer, or ask why you want to know, but at least you haven't started off by disrespecting me. I'm not sure how so many businesses have become confused about this. Maybe they've calculated that pissing off a substantial number of their customers is a worthwhile trade-off, but it seems like a bad direction to go in even if the short-term numbers look positive. </rambly paranoia>
All the rewards and loyalty programs are keeping track of all your activity and is being made accessible to the staff that interacts with you. From a business perspective, an unknown person offers more risk than an known person so it makes financial sense to know who you're dealing with. In high margin, low volume businesses this was already in place, just with sales people keeping track. It just wasn't easily possible to do that for whole populations until recently such as retail, hotels, airlines, etc.
I imagine soon many will start cataloging how many times a customer causes damage or makes a scene or is rude to staff, and if it gets logged with enough frequency, they get banned system wide. It'll be interesting to see how long "the customer is always right" stays in place once we have no choice but to deal with home Depot or Lowe's, or Walmart vs target vs Amazon, or one of the 4 or 5 airlines and hotel companies.
Lenders and landlords have been doing it since forever, no reason for the other businesses to not get on board. All the troublemakers will be sifted through and left to deal with organizations outside of the mainstream.
I agree with the customer's perspective of this. But there are businesses where personalization is key. For example, YouTube absolutely needs to know you in order to keep you watching addictive content. Without this, they would probably still not be profitable.
If you want to know something about me, just ask. I might refuse to answer, or ask why you want to know, but at least you haven't started off by disrespecting me. I'm not sure how so many businesses have become confused about this. Maybe they've calculated that pissing off a substantial number of their customers is a worthwhile trade-off, but it seems like a bad direction to go in even if the short-term numbers look positive. </rambly paranoia>