People who run stores have told me they could never do it as bluntly or as meanly as the airlines do. If you don’t have a good number of miles on an airline, you get treated like the back of the bus. You’re not going to get the best seats, you’re going to be in Zone 4, you may have to give up your bags. That’s mean! But it works.

But have you ever seen anybody revolt? I’ve never sat at a gate where some guy says, “Hey, I just paid 700 dollars for this damn flight! I can’t help it if I don’t have a frequent flier plan! Why am I in Zone 4?”

People tell me stores can’t go that far in many cases because people have more choices than they have with airlines. But there is this sense that if they cultivate you in a certain way and you prove a certain kind of loyalty—if you don’t buy just the bargain goods, for example; if you buy the expensive stuff that’s not on sale; if you show that you’re a person that’s in good standing—you’ll be treated better than if you just walked in. “Better,” in quotes.

If a person is only looking for sales and they go back and forth to different stores, and the store has no profile on them, they may not be treated very well at all and they may not get the best prices and they may not even get the kinds of products pitched at them that other people would want.

But, as I say, the larger issue is social. What does it mean that people are walking through a society, wondering how they’re scored, and what do people think of them? The fact that I know you—is that affecting the prices I’m getting?

Waddell: The frequent flier example made me think: There’s two ways to win at that game. Either you’re just very wealthy and fly all the time, or you can become part of this small group of people who try to game the system and spend a lot of time and energy doing strange things like buying round-trip flights without actually getting off, in order to improve their status as much as possible. Are we going to be doing this for grocery-store points someday?

Turow: Yes! I think so.

Some grocery could say, “Based on your mood, we will give you the best products to make you feel well that day.” There’s a whole blending of issues—we’re so stuck sometimes looking at demographic characteristics that we don’t realize today that’s the tip of the iceberg. Companies are looking at lifestyle, they’re looking at habits, they’re looking at who your friends are, they're looking at what you say about them online, and sometimes what you say about other things. They’re interested in your hobbies, and what that says about you and the kinds of things you and your family might get.

And the larger theme is not just that it’ll affect what you buy. My overarching argument is that it is training people to accept this kind of attitude in every aspect of our lives, for every kind of institution. Once we get used to the idea of doing this in the store, we’ll get used to the idea of doing it everywhere. It is a training ground. It is what I call the “hidden curriculum.” That’s the hidden curriculum of the retail business: to get people used to the idea of giving up their data for the purposes of relevance and tradeoffs and all that.

At the same time, I argue, while all these fights are going on in Washington about marketing and the NSA and advertising, on a day-to-day basis, people are learning to give up this data as a logical, natural part of life, in their everyday shopping.

So if it happens that I go into the Global Entry office and they say, “How about this?” I say, “Well, yeah, I’ve done that before!” I get used to the idea, and it becomes second nature to think about giving up data.