Let me just start by saying I am entirely on the restaurant's side in this, and believe that this just another attempt at vendor lock-in from OpenTable. Restau

Let me just start by saying I am entirely on the restaurant's side in this, and believe that this just another attempt at vendor lock-in from OpenTable. Restaurants have been fighting for customer control with OT for a long time, and at the end of the day, I'm fine with the restaurant, who actually see me in person, talk to me, and serve me the food, keeping notes on me to improve service. OT, less so. I'm not particularly personally concerned about privacy in this space, but it seems much better to have this data split up in the hands of the people who actually see me in person, rather than the faceless tool trying to aggregate my behavior. To add some color to this, I recently was shown my customer notes by the GM at a medium-high end Michelin starred restaurant where I've been a regular for a long time. There's some basic notes from the early days about the name of my partner I was dining with, and food allergies and preferences. There's also a long, long list over several years of every extra dish that was sent out (I generally get 2-3 extra courses at this place), with the goal of not duplicating those courses. The notes have tailed off for the past few years because, probably because everybody knows me and has chatted with me at this point, so they know they can just ask me for whatever, and that I'm a pretty easy customer. So like I said, I'm comfortable with this level of information in the hands of the restaurant. Pretty much everyone I've talked to in the industry is interested in this information strictly for the purposes of better service - nobody has grandiose plans of ever using this data outside of their own restaurant. OT provides a nice service in standardizing and simplifying the reservation process, but I'm inclined to think this is an power grab to try to force restaurants to stay within their ecosystem - and frankly, at the end of the day, I don't much care if OT lives or dies, but I do care about my local restaurants.