Bull
You are forgetting the other party in the rental agreement. The hotel owner.
As the owner of a hotel room that I am renting to someone to use, or, say, the owner of a car or van that I am renting to someone to use, I have a right to know the person to whom I am renting my property.
As the owner I am pulled into certain aspects of liability... and I have a right to know to whom I am contracting.
YOU DON"T HAVE A RIGHT TO FALSIFY YOUR IDENTITY IN ENTERING INTO A CONTRACT.
You also don't have to divulge every piece of information that a person or a company asks you for, Phil. And any more, it seems as though every entity is after as much of our personal data as they can get their grubby little real or virtual hands on. I don't trust anything these days, and I bet there have been situations where a person wound up giving too much information to a hotel (i.e., more than they absolutely had to, because the hotel insisted they had the right to this and that, see Phil's previous posts) and got burned by it. A cheated-on spouse seeing a charge on a visa bill, even though the desk clerk said they weren't going to run it, or someone receiving the rewards program information in the mail because the hotel set their computers up to default a registration for every guest unless they opt-out or some other nonsense. Your argument sounds to me like the "corporations are people too, my friend" defense, and my point is that we should defend our right to privacy whenever we can. Or we can sit back and watch as it goes away forever.
I understand that a hotel has the right to some information and payment for a person renting a room, and I doubt anyone on this thread disputes that. But where do you draw the line? And if the line is shifting, don't we have a right to fight back against it? I don't just mean hotels, I am referring to more of the general idea. I had a teller at a bank drive-thru actually ask me for my mother's maiden name, in the drive-thru lane and over the speaker, so she could send me some credit card deal I didn't ask for. Another time I was leaving a Walmart in Denver and the bitch employee acted like she had the right to inspect the bag I was carrying out of the store because it was their policy. I showed it to her, only because my mother was embarrassed that I was acting, as she later told me, 'huffy' - and then I told her she's lucky I didn't stand there and read the imaginary search warrant while the bag was checked.
I wasn't advocating fraud in my previous post, but like I said, defending our right to privacy doesn't mean that we are up to something illegal, or even immoral. I can understand the desire to fly under the radar as much as possible, in just about every situation. That was the point I was trying to get across, not sure if that was successful.
