Non-Obvious Relationship Awareness

I'm enjoying the new O'Reilly Radar, blog, and am intrigued by this post by Tim on Non Obvious Relationship Awareness:

.... Jeff Jonas [is the] founder of System Research and Development (SRD), the data mining company that made its name in Las Vegas with a technology called NORA (Non-Obvious Relationship Awareness) -- software that would alert casino security, for instance, that the dealer at table 11 once shared a phone number with the guy who is winning big at that same table....

His current focus is "anonymous entity resolution" -- the ability to share sensitive data without actually revealing it. That is, by using one-way hashes, you can look across various databases for a match without actually pooling all the data and making it available to all. As you can imagine, solving this problem is fairly critical to the government if they want "total information awareness" while maintaining citizen privacy and some semblance of civil liberties.

O'Reilly Radar also led me to this great post on Object-centred Sociality, with which, it is probably pointless to say, I very much agree. :) I'll have to check out The Practice Turn in ContemporaryTheory by Karin Knorr Cetina. I just ordered it.