Daniel Neman Daniel Neman is a food writer for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Follow Daniel Neman Close Get email notifications on {{subject}} daily! Your notification has been saved. There was a problem saving your notification. {{description}} Email notifications are only sent once a day, and only if there are new matching items. Save Manage followed notifications Close Followed notifications Please log in to use this feature Log In Don't have an account? Sign Up Today

All I want to do is make a reservation at my favorite restaurant. Or any restaurant, for that matter. I’m not picky.

But you can’t pick up the phone anymore and ask to make a reservation. That involves too much personal interaction, and an increasingly large segment of our population shies away from personal interaction.

To get a reservation at many places these days, you absolutely have to go online. If you don’t have a computer or a smart phone, you can’t get a reservation.

But most people do have a computer or a smart phone, and restaurants apparently don’t care about the people who do not. So for the rest of us who are part of the 21st century (or at least the 1990s), reservations are simple. All you have to do is go online and reserve a table. It’s easy.

Only it isn’t that easy. When you reserve a table online, you do much more than reserve a table. The actual table reservation is the least of it.

When you reserve a table online, you specifically give powerful computer companies the right to know your name, your address, your email address, your phone number, your credit card numbers.