"When I spoke with Cranor, she was floored by just how often I went to McDonald’s: “This guy eats a lot of McDonald's.” My boss, who was also stunned by my processed-food choices, says I now have to stop eating there. Despite my love of crispy Diet Cokes and greasy french fries, I agree."
I wonder how many of us would stop going not just to McDonald’s, but all the other places if we knew just how much they ALL have in our files. They're not tracking us to be helpful, they're tracking us to increase their profits.
In my area, the majority of McDonald's customers use the drive thru, and the dining room isn't very busy. So for the price of a coffee I can get a couple hours of work done from a table near a power outlet and wifi.
My only complaint is their firewall blocks the tailscale control plane.
At first I thought "building a 515-page dossier" was needlessly hyperbolic for what amounts to a printed PDF of typical CRM values from a database. It's not like a McDonald's detective meticulously crafted it.
However, companies do have an absurd amount of data on us, and the fact that it's automatically collected makes it more troubling, not less. But it's normalized.
> Privacy experts I spoke with said this level of detail may feel invasive, but it's fairly standard for how large companies in the US run their loyalty programs.
Something can be both invasive and standard. This practice is both.
Some of the collection is creepy, and I’ve largely stopped using mobile apps and loyalty programs myself. However, some of the concern seems very misplaced.
“Oh no McDonald’s runs a Customer Lifetime Value algorithm, a thing in use for decades and which has minimal privacy implications.”
“GASP the Golden Arches knows I like Diet Coke and has applied a marketing segmentation to me!”
Congrats, you’ve discovered they use concepts taught in Marketing 101?
Yeah, it’s 500+ pages, where is the surprising stuff? I assume the author of the piece would have chosen to list out the most egregious/shocking data out of the document, right?
I don’t think any of this is non-surprising in the “we’ve been conditioned to think this is normal” kind of way. This is really just a basic transaction history with extremely basic non-AI analytics applied.
The length of the document sounds scary but it also seems like it’s essentially a transaction list.
I would have thought the article might get into more details like location tracking like being able to predict where that person would be at a certain time, or maybe details inferred from data like “this person buys McFlurries when they’re on their period.”
Something scarier would be figuring our friend and family relationships, where relatives and friends live, etc.
I’m sure that could be done with data like this, and it’s critical that companies like McDonald’s keep that data secure and delete it when they don’t need it. We should have better laws in that regard.
At some point McDonald’s doesn’t really care about all that extra creepy stuff. Anything beyond figuring out your buying preferences is not useful information to them. The biggest concern would be that they would be willing to sell that data to someone else who is interested.
That’s where I’m at. I really don’t care if an individual business collects usage data like this. I have a problem when that data is used outside of that context.
Try to sell me more burgers and fries? Fine, but don’t tell my doctor, or palantir, or the government etc etc. I don’t believe that’s a huge ask as a consumer in the Information Age.
In my area, the majority of McDonald's customers use the drive thru, and the dining room isn't very busy. So for the price of a coffee I can get a couple hours of work done from a table near a power outlet and wifi.
My only complaint is their firewall blocks the tailscale control plane.
At first I thought "building a 515-page dossier" was needlessly hyperbolic for what amounts to a printed PDF of typical CRM values from a database. It's not like a McDonald's detective meticulously crafted it.
However, companies do have an absurd amount of data on us, and the fact that it's automatically collected makes it more troubling, not less. But it's normalized.
What is the word “but” doing in this sentence?
> Privacy experts I spoke with said this level of detail may feel invasive, but it's fairly standard for how large companies in the US run their loyalty programs.
Something can be both invasive and standard. This practice is both.
Could solve this, and in turn rid the world of a huge amount of algorithmic slop, by taxing companies according to how much personal data they hold.
> “McDonald’s secret sauce is really commercial surveillance,” says Jeff Chester
Great line. I do really love their fries though.
Some of the collection is creepy, and I’ve largely stopped using mobile apps and loyalty programs myself. However, some of the concern seems very misplaced.
“Oh no McDonald’s runs a Customer Lifetime Value algorithm, a thing in use for decades and which has minimal privacy implications.”
“GASP the Golden Arches knows I like Diet Coke and has applied a marketing segmentation to me!”
Congrats, you’ve discovered they use concepts taught in Marketing 101?
Yeah, it’s 500+ pages, where is the surprising stuff? I assume the author of the piece would have chosen to list out the most egregious/shocking data out of the document, right?
I don’t think any of this is non-surprising in the “we’ve been conditioned to think this is normal” kind of way. This is really just a basic transaction history with extremely basic non-AI analytics applied.
The length of the document sounds scary but it also seems like it’s essentially a transaction list.
I would have thought the article might get into more details like location tracking like being able to predict where that person would be at a certain time, or maybe details inferred from data like “this person buys McFlurries when they’re on their period.”
Something scarier would be figuring our friend and family relationships, where relatives and friends live, etc.
I’m sure that could be done with data like this, and it’s critical that companies like McDonald’s keep that data secure and delete it when they don’t need it. We should have better laws in that regard.
At some point McDonald’s doesn’t really care about all that extra creepy stuff. Anything beyond figuring out your buying preferences is not useful information to them. The biggest concern would be that they would be willing to sell that data to someone else who is interested.
That’s where I’m at. I really don’t care if an individual business collects usage data like this. I have a problem when that data is used outside of that context.
Try to sell me more burgers and fries? Fine, but don’t tell my doctor, or palantir, or the government etc etc. I don’t believe that’s a huge ask as a consumer in the Information Age.
If the concern is misplaced, where should it be placed?