I requested a copy of my data from McDonald’s loyalty program

generj

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?

nerevarthelame

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.

blakesterz

"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.

wxw

> “McDonald’s secret sauce is really commercial surveillance,” says Jeff Chester Great line. I do really love their fries though.

juiceland

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.

elevation

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.

owisd

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.

tolugenius

Similarly this reminds of Target's surveillance system, which is loved and adopted by police and federal agencies ( https://unicornriot.ninja/21st-century-jim-crow-a-series/ ). Honestly it's one of the more technically advanced things about them or any store.

nDRDY

How many pages would be required to store all the information that a shopkeeper knows about one of their regulars?

hamdingers

Data has ruined fast food (among many other businesses). When I was young it was common for a McDonalds to have 10+ employees working the lunch rush, one for every station and a few floaters cleaning the dining room. Someone took your order right away, and you got your meal in a minute or two. Now I go and it's 3, sometimes 2 employees. You order on a tablet, and 10+ minutes later an overworked employee sets it on the counter and scurries away, probably after realizing it's not a drive-thru order. The dining room hasn't been cleaned since 6am, the trash cans are full. There's at least one alarm going off constantly. Back then they were run based on someones intuition of what makes a good customer experience. Now they're run based on the data, and the data says they have enough loyal-to-a-fault customers like the author that chronically understaffing is more profitable than providing a good experience.

shpx

"I was concerned about being surveilled so I also uploaded all my data to an LLM company"

haunter

https://archive.md/gkqRQ

boscillator

What is the point of predictive analytics for them? Surely they don't care about what one specific customer will do, only in aggregate? Since ML models can only learn from past aggregates, wouldn't traditional statistics on past transactions make more sense?

whywhywhywhy

>“McDonald’s secret sauce is really commercial surveillance,” Journo is search of a narrative that isn't there. McDonalds could stop tracking customers tomorrow and people would still be eating the same food there in 50 years. The secret sauce is has more to do with actual sauce than anything claimed here.

skeledrew

Well... that's what it means to opt into convenience and benefits. That loyalty program that benefits the customer over the years of course also benefits the company, and not just by making said customer more "loyal".

jsrozner

"She says a more beneficial approach for consumers would be highly detailed disclosures during the sign-up process that lay out what’s going to be stored in your 'permanent record' and how that data will be used to make specific inferences about you." No. You should never have to try to figure out what companies are collecting or how they are using it. They should not ever be allowed to aggregate data at the individual level. And if aggregate data ever becomes fine-grained enough to fingerprint individuals, then regulation should force coarser graining. (This would mean that better machine learning systems would result in companies being able to collect less data.) We should have forced audits of every consumer company.

teiferer

Irony: The first thing shown to me when opening that Wired article was an info box asking me to agreeing to data collection.

anon_cow1111

There is an 18MB gif playing on this page. What the hell is wrong with Wired?

christina97

Is it not common knowledge that this is the entire purpose of loyalty programs? As far as I know, if you don’t give them your details and just swipe a card, they are not doing facial recognition and PCI stops them from linking your purchases too heavily. I’m not really surprised by anything here but the fact that McDonalds disclosed all their predictions? The bigger question here is whether it is good for large corporations to be run with such brutal profit motives, running on extremely precise data to uncover how to best make a bigger profit. It doesn’t appear good to me, but it is how the entire US economy operates. The lift from the per-customer loyalty timeseries and per-customer upsells is probably modest compared to the rest of the data driven work to understand how to sell more “product”.

bawolff

> I requested a copy of my data from McDonald’s loyalty program and received an extensive, personalized report that algorithmically predicts my next purchase. I mean, that is exactly what i would think a loyalty program would contain.