McDonald's Built a 515-Page Dossier on Me. It Says I'll Never Stop Eating There

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.

> While the sheer amount of data McDonald’s stored over the years caught me off guard at first, the way it was used by the company’s predictive algorithms was what I found most concerning. The company predicted how often I would visit in the next six weeks (2.16 times), what I would spend on average ($13.49), and what I would spend in total ($29.15).

I always feel a bit disconnected from what other people feel when I read things like this.

Personally, this kind of data doesn’t bother me at all, and is the type of data I don’t mind them having at all, and is the type of analysis I expect them to do. Using the data they have about my direct interactions with them to predict how I interact with them in the future seems fine. As long as they aren’t charging me extra, why should I be upset that they can predict what I will do based on my predictable behavior?

Their job is to provide me a good service that makes me want to keep coming back and giving them my business. If they can use the information from my past interactions with them to provide a better service to me, that seems fine.

My daughter has ARFID, and for about a year McDonald’s chicken nuggets were one of the only safe foods she would eat, so I went quite a few times. I felt much more embarrassed and worried about the workers who saw me there all the time than the app knowing i was there all the time.

What is the actual concern with McDonalds having this data about you? That they will charge you more if they know you wi […]

>“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.

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.

Some alternatives to archive.md

No risk of CAPTCHA or geo-blocking

No cookie, no user-agent header requirement, no <center>, etc.

No Javascript, text-only

Option 1

curl -A "" -Haccept: https://www.wired.com/story/mcdonalds-built-a-515-page-dossier-on-me-it-says-ill-never-leave/ \

|grep -o "<p c.*</p><d" \

|sed '1s/^/<meta charset=utf-8>/;s/..$//' > 1.htm

firefox ./1.htm

Option 2

links https://www.wired.com/story/mcdonalds-built-a-515-page-dossier-on-me-it-says-ill-never-leave/

elinks https://www.wired.com/story/mcdonalds-built-a-515-page-dossier-on-me-it-says-ill-never-leave/

Option 3 Add CSP response header; adjust to taste

http-response add-header Content-Security-Policy "default-src 'none'"

Option 4 (no URLs, no table formatting)

curl -A "" -Haccept: https://www.wired.com/story/mcdonalds-built-a-515-page-dossier-on-me-it-says-ill-never-leave/ \

|grep -o "articleBody.*isBasedOn" \

|sed 's/.\{14\}/<meta charset=utf-8>/;s/.\{12\}$//;s/\\n/<p>/g;' > 1.htm

firefox ./1.htm

"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.

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.

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”.

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.