Santa is hardly the only one watching you

Ever wonder how Santa sees you when you're sleeping and knows when you're awake? Forget mystical powers. Kris Kringle probably has access to the same technology used nearly everywhere these days to track what people do and where they do it.

The NSA? Sure, it's listening. Major cities? Cameras are mounted all over the place. Corporations harvest personal data at an unfathomable rate because they want to anticipate and influence consumer behavior.

Such activity is likely to only increase. According to a Pew study titled The Future of Privacy, 55 percent of experts canvassed did not "believe that an accepted privacy-rights regime and infrastructure would be created in the coming decade."

But other entities have increasingly jumped on the bandwagon and begun watching people, whether for greater security or to gather information for more efficient marketing and operations. Who needs a sleigh and flying reindeer when you have the Internet, computers and remote sensors to know who's been bad or good?

Museums now put electronic eyes on their visitors. The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City has begun installing technology with the goal "to share information about artworks to visitors via their smartphones and to possibly leverage the ... technology to understand how visitors move through the museum and where their time is spent," as the museum explained to CBS MoneyWatch in an email.

Similarly, the Dallas Museum of Art offers check-in points, and the Minneapolis Institute of Arts relies heavily on survey results to understand what people want and how they use the museums. It's the application of Big Data to art as entertainment.

The Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, uses visitor data to help it sell more in the gift shop. The more you know about how people move through the building, what they look at most and what they respond to, the better you can please them -- or get them to open their wallets.

Unfortunately, that can turn the education and exploration missions of institutions on their heads as popularity contests potentially take on weightier presences.

Then there's the issue of data privacy and the question of when the constant need to bring in money might overly tempt an organization with lots of data to act as a proxy for marketers who want to get the inside dope on reaching consumers.

Top hospitality spots have long been known for their attention to detail about their patrons. Computers only make it easier. A restaurant can track whether you're a repeat or new customer, what foods you prefer, where you like to sit and even your history of spending and tipping.

Restaurants say they want to pamper people by offering what they tend to like, but the "creep" factor can be considerable when staff you've never before met show up with exactly what you had in mind. That possibility hits a new level of unsettling when Web-based reservation services like OpenTable allow restaurants to store and potentially share information.

Hotels often do the same. Some have taken to checking social network rankings to help determine who will get special attention. The hope is that folks with large followings might say something nice and spread the umbrella of their influence.

Retailers increasingly experiment with tracking consumers by their mobile phones that have a Wi-Fi connection left on. The devices have unique network identifiers. Add a company app to the picture, and the store might know exactly who they follow. Even with no phone, some stores use sophisticated camera systems that can identify and track a person.

The greater ability technology has to track, monitor and profile individuals, the more ways companies, governments and institutions will have to implement such systems and the more rationalizations for why they should.