10 ms·

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

235 points by thehoff 2mo ago

tito 2mo ago
Anyone vibe code a tool to read the data? I wanna see what mine is!
- tito 2mo ago
  200+ comments tripping over themselves to say “I’m not bothered” and zero github repos to process 500 page datasets. HN letting me down!
  - tito 2mo ago
    I requested my data from McDonalds yesterday. McDonalds sends a verification email right after to your email address to confirm. I confirmed and haven't heard anything else back yet.
    - tito 2mo ago
      Status - no word from McDonalds yet
      - tito 1mo ago
        still no response
haunter 2mo ago
https://archive.md/gkqRQ https://archive.md/gkqRQ
generj 2mo ago
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?
- Grombobulous 2mo ago
  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.
- juiceland 2mo ago
  If the concern is misplaced, where should it be placed?
  - whartung 2mo ago
    The concern is when the data breaks out of the silos. It should not shock anyone that Amazon has an entire history of everything that you've ever bought. I would likely not surprise anyone here that they have a log of every item you've clicked on, or even moused over. The beauty of modern systems is that storing all of that data is very cheap. The dark side is if the fellow queried McDonalds and found not just his McDonalds trends, but his shopping habits from, say, Target. Where McDs and Target perhaps had a data sharing agreement to correlate customers. Or seeing a copy of his credit report in there buried underneath the stack of Diet Coke and Quarter Pounder receipts. That's where the concern shows up. Not the raw data, but the cross cutting concerns as the data is potentially more centralized. Perhaps into a company that you don't even know is collecting info on you. Some corp that McDs is sharing with. You request your dossier from McDs because you know they're collecting your data. But you don't request it from Company X, because you don't know they're doing so. Then there's the issue of handing the data over to the authorities without so much as a warrant -- different problem.
elevation 2mo ago
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.
- oniony 2mo ago
  I wonder if they monitor your internet traffic.
  - Nextgrid 2mo ago
    Traffic monitoring for a fast food chain is dubious at best even in the unencrypted days, but basically useless since the advent of HTTPS and TLS everywhere.
    - hod6654 2mo ago
      They can still log what sites you're visiting by inspecting the SNI of your TLS handshakes
- 07c84979b3b5d7 2mo ago
  > My only complaint is their firewall blocks the tailscale control plane. Brother, did you give your brain to AI already? There exists technology
  - criddell 2mo ago
    If you have a suggestion, you should give it.
    - selectodude 2mo ago
      If you initiate the connection on your cell phone hotspot and then connect to WiFi, it’ll continue working.
nerevarthelame 2mo ago
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.
- fluoridation 2mo ago
  >the fact that it's automatically collected makes it more troubling, not less I don't think so. You can inflate raw data arbitrarily. They could have laid out on a page the decimal byte values of a one minute video clip of you waiting in line or something. Something redacted by a human would be much more dense in terms of relevant information, and much more digested. If it's just a data dump then at least it's information that not necessarily anyone knows, in the sense of residing in someone's brain. Information collection is also not necessarily malicious. You can never know what you might need in the future. I was kind of on board with Recall, if the data could live in storage in my control and can I could turn it on and off at will.
  - Arainach 2mo ago
    > Information collection is also not necessarily malicious Anyone collecting information has an obligation to think about how it could be used in the future - whether by government or by corporation. McDonald's has also very visibly and successfully switched to gamifying their order selection with machines and dark patterns to drive people to higher priced items, so it's safe for anyone there to assume any data collected will be used to harm customers in such ways.
blakesterz 2mo ago
"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.
- moribvndvs 2mo ago
  At my first start up, I unfortunately relied on fast food daily. One night I pulled into a Wendy’s and the drive thru operator opened with “Hey Mike. Working late again, eh? The usual [my usual order]”. I don't recall having a friendly relationship with the operator or really talking to any one in particular, so this freaked me out and also made me feel a bit of shame. I stopped going after that. Granted, this was just a friendly worker but your question reminded me of it. Definitely prompted me to remove the Taco Bell app. I don’t need the occasional free bean burrito that badly.
  - criddell 2mo ago
    One of the people working at the coffee place my wife and I stop at after grocery shopping remembered my name and order and I thought it was pretty nice to be greeted by name. They aren't there anymore and I miss it.
    - moribvndvs 2mo ago
      It does sound nice for a local shop. And I don’t discredit the worker for being nice in my case. I was however disturbed by the fact I was shamefully slamming that much fast food at 1 AM every day.
      - masfuerte 2mo ago
        User name checks out!
wxw 2mo ago
> “McDonald’s secret sauce is really commercial surveillance,” says Jeff Chester Great line. I do really love their fries though.
juiceland 2mo ago
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.
- karmakurtisaani 2mo ago
  It means you don't need to worry, just trust the mega corporation to do what's best for you with this data!
- goda90 2mo ago
  I see a lot of "don't worry about privacy invasion X, because privacy invasion Y is unavoidable." when talking about this stuff. People are being trained to accept "normal" violations
  - rpdillon 2mo ago
    In general, I agree with you and I'm a privacy advocate. In this particular case, though, it seems like we're railing against the idea that a retailer with repeat customers keeps track of what those customers are buying most frequently and how much they spend. It would be very surprising if retailers didn't retain that info, since it's data owned by the company, generated by the core business itself, and useful for forecasting. I'm having trouble understanding the "invasive" part. I grew up in New York state, but my dad used to shop from a company called Cable Car Clothiers, based out of San Francisco, and he'd order everything by mail or over the phone. He probably shopped there for 20 years or more before I moved to San Francisco and I literally walked by that very shop on my way to work. He knew that my new job took me by their storefront and so he asked me to go in and pick something up for him. I had a short conversation with the shop owner who had a retail system that showed every order my dad had ever placed going all the way back to the late 80s. There is a bunch of derivative data that is available when you have a log like this, like the total amount ever spent, the most frequently purchased item, date of the most recent purchase, date of the oldest purchase, etc. Is it the scale of McDonalds that's causing concern, or is it something else?
deleted 2mo ago
[deleted]
owisd 2mo ago
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 2mo ago
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/ https://unicornriot.ninja/21st-century-jim-crow-a-series/). Honestly it's one of the more technically advanced things about them or any store.
- criddell 2mo ago
  I've seen a lot of stories about how Target's loss prevention staff will track thefts over multiple visits and don't get the police involved until the loss passes some threshold. I've always wondered how they are able to get convictions from a theft months ago with no evidence that you actually possessed the item after you left the store? Is it really good enough to just have video that looks like you probably stole something and an inventory system that they claim shows lost inventory?
  - datakan 2mo ago
    Do you think the people getting caught are going to trial or just taking plea deals?
    - criddell 2mo ago
      I suppose also if they have video over months showing a pattern of a person appearing to steal it might be enough to get past any claims that you ditched the item before leaving many times over a period of months.
  - henry700 2mo ago
    > I've always wondered how they are able to get convictions from a theft months ago with no evidence that you actually possessed the item after you left the store? If you steal a car and dump it in the sea, but there's camera footage of you stealing the car, is the camera footage not enough evidence even if they don't find the car?
    - criddell 2mo ago
nDRDY 2mo ago
How many pages would be required to store all the information that a shopkeeper knows about one of their regulars?
- rpdillon 2mo ago
  Yeah, the discussion is not differentiating between data that's collected, meaning it's not their data (and so they'd have to ask you for it), and data that is generated by the business itself, which is their data. Businesses knowing what frequent customers buy most often and how much they spend goes back hundreds of years, I'd expect.
hamdingers 2mo ago
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.
- bothers 2mo ago
  Data has replaced knowledge, and the true tragedy of this will only be felt by our children and their children. But it will be felt keenly.
- toast0 2mo ago
  > 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. When I was young, they predicted orders and had hot food waiting, you would get your meal as you ordered. Unfortunately, after merciless teasing by other chains, they relented and only assemble to order and cook to order in some cases. Huge increase in lunch latency; ordering via the app can help a little...
  - 07c84979b3b5d7 2mo ago
    Yes, I remember that too. They even had this one promotion back in the day where you could start some timer after you ordered and if you didn't get your meal in 60 seconds you did get something for free (was it the full order? I dont remember). It's been so obvious for a long long time now, but people still keep believing that smart things make you faster or give you a better life or whatever, but that just doesn't add up. It's just frustrating, often takes longer and the only reason it is there is to grab your data. There is no other reason. Edit: Found it. You did get a coke for free. Damn, 2004. https://www.burgerschachteln.de/2004/Sonstiges/index.htm https://www.burgerschachteln.de/2004/Sonstiges/index.htm
shpx 2mo ago
"I was concerned about being surveilled so I also uploaded all my data to an LLM company"
boscillator 2mo ago
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?
- ceejayoz 2mo ago
  They can see if marketing changes your behavior. "We predict he won't get fries until Monday. Send a push notification."
- RevEng 2mo ago
  Targeted advertising. That can be banner ads, notifications, featured suggestions or anything else. Knowing what your are most likely to accept tells them what they should offer. The goal is always conversions: turning ad impressions into sales.
whywhywhywhy 2mo ago
>“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.
- xp84 2mo ago
  Yes and no. Businesses like these succeed and fail at the margins. If McDonalds declines in popularity too much, franchisees start folding and the whole operation could absolutely collapse. All their competitors are looking for ways to exploit areas of weakness, whether it's "value" or "speed" or "quality." Most of the "loyalty" regimes are organized to work on the "value" side of the equation, since the only way a promo (like "free fries" that I received yesterday) has any ROI, is if it's designed in a way to bring in the "right" people who will spend enough money, and to have the way to contact them going forward to bring them back again and again. By contrast, handing out free fries to everyone who walks in the door is not going to be worth the cost.
  - zbentley 2mo ago
    Franchise failure rates don’t bear out that being a real risk. However, McDonald’s is publicly traded, and investor pressure to improve at the margins may make a business that is fundamentally well served by being change-averse do stupid things.
    - xp84 2mo ago
      Other chains have had lots of franchises fail though. A&W used to be big. Long John Silvers. Are you saying McD specifically can’t fail? Or that none can?
      - whywhywhywhy 2mo ago
        A&W peaked at 2400 locations, Long John Silvers at 1080. McDonalds is currently 46,000, 13k of those in the US alone. It's just not even comparable.
skeledrew 2mo ago
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".
azhdanova 2mo ago
[flagged]
jsrozner 2mo ago
"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 2mo ago
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 2mo ago
There is an 18MB gif playing on this page. What the hell is wrong with Wired?
christina97 2mo ago
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”.
- OkayPhysicist 2mo ago
  It's not the entire purpose of the loyalty program. The other reason (possibly the bigger reason) is simple price discrimination. McDonald's found that there are two distinct groups of customers: habitual fast food eaters, who go to their restaurants on a very regular basis, and opportunistic fast food eaters, who grab some fast food once in a blue moon because they want something fast. They found, perhaps counterintuitively, that the opportunistic customers are vastly less price sensitive than the habitual customers. The solution was a somewhat involved loyalty program, which is deliberately enough effort to set up to weed out the sporadic customers from using it. Now, they can charge the less-price sensitive one price, and their more price sensitive customers a different, lower price. As an added bonus, habitual customers are probably more susceptible to advertising/prompting.
  - nitwit005 2mo ago
    I suspect there is actually three groups, because the app also has a sort of coupon-ing in it. The lowest price requires you to search the app to find a "deal" that is currently available, rather than just use your loyalty points to get a discount. One of the ideas of classic coupons was to offer a lower price to the most price sensitive customers. The people willing to deal with the fuss of finding and cutting out the coupons.
bawolff 2mo ago
> 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.
cortesoft 2mo ago
> 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 will come back anyway?
- jen20 2mo ago
  > What is the actual concern with McDonalds having this data about you? That they will sell it to someone else, who will match it with other available data to derive a profile with which they can do bad or immoral things.
  - x0x0 2mo ago
    Or not just sell. Random state governments may be able to rifle through it.
  - schnebbau 2mo ago
    > which they can do bad or immoral things Such as...? Lure me into a trap with a 10-piece spicy mcnugget that they know I can't resist?
zerof1l 2mo ago
I don’t see anything wrong with the general statistics mentioned in the article such as average order spend or number of visits being calculated with your consent. Curious though what’s in the rest of the mentioned 500 pages. As someone on both sides of the equation, any organization should be doing some kind of tracking and statistics. The bad part, and what upsets most people, including me, is when this information is aggregated across multiple services, gets attached to my real identity, and then sold to somebody. As long as this information stays with that one company, ideally is not linked to my real identity, and the company won’t sell or transfer it elsewhere, such as to an insurance company, I don’t really see a problem here.
tbyehl 2mo ago
Some time this year the McDonald's iOS app started demanding that I let it track my location at all times in order for it to keep me signed in. No thanks.
wrboyce 2mo ago
I did this a few years ago with a few companies. The most “interesting” was eBay, the data itself was predictably boring but they sent it to me on a USB flash drive!
tonymet 2mo ago
McDonald’s is likely the safest fast food restaurant to divulge your eating habits and other personal information to because they will treasure that data and never share it with third parties
tonymet 2mo ago
Aren’t we mostly engineers here who have been paid to build these accounting systems , so it’s not our place to criticize McDonalds for deploying them .
gverrilla 2mo ago
Oh they know much more than that. They're probably doing statistics on when you're going to die (=not a customer anymore) considering your diet, etc. Funny thing is this kind of "news article" is properly McDonalds propaganda.
FireBeyond 2mo ago
I say this recognizing 1) that I am guilty too of what I am about to say, as a Product person, and 2) that I still think it’s insidious… But there is definitely a slight logical disconnect between the levels of outrage or nefariousness at the actions being discussed here from a segment of the population who dedicates significant resources to building and having in depth product telemetry and metrics in the businesses we work for.
S0y 2mo ago
I'm personally not too alarmed by this. All the tracking is in the context of their franchise and I honestly find the stats pretty cool. If in the end it helps them to provide me a better service, I'm all for it. But I also never really was of the opinion that McDonalds was a large evil corporation.
HarHarVeryFunny 2mo ago
A 515 page file on a single customer ?! OK, so they've figured out the guy likes Diet coke, and is likely to come back, and what exactly are they going to do with this information ? I suppose they could send him a Diet Coke coupon, but they've already figured him as a sucker that is going to come back anyway. I guess they could sell his data to someone else - maybe Burger King would pay to get a slice of this fast-food addicted customer ? Really I don't get it. Sending out coupons is about the only thing that makes sense, but 515 pages of tracking ?!
- recursivecaveat 2mo ago
  If you want to push ads or "recommendations" I can see personalized data being useful. Almost every actionable idea I can imagine is only reasonable when applied to aggregate statistics though. Interesting how because there is no cost or fear in collecting 515 pages of personalized data, it happens, even if there's no dubious actual utility.
- frollogaston 2mo ago
  If anything, they might use this info to not send him more coupons. Most "loyalty" programs I've used have been nicest to me for being disloyal. Also, they're probably just collecting it all cause why not. Might be useful.
- shusaku 2mo ago
  McDonald’s wants to go to investors and drop buzzwords like analytics and AI. The point of 515 pages is to inflate their stats about how valuable their data is
Varelion 2mo ago
I'm sick of greed, be it from people, companies, or their data hoarding practices.
d_theorist 2mo ago
Shocking that the McDonald's app knows about your McDonald's purchases. This is - forgive me - a McNothing Burger.
xfz 2mo ago
Not exactly news, unless this is aimed at naïve teenagers who don't know any better. Personally I stopped eating at McDonald's 21 years ago and it's the easiest thing in the world to quit (although I don't live in the USA, may not be a perfectly fair comparison). Tangentially, here in the UK many supermarkets have upped the ante for people who don't want loyalty cards by introducing differential pricing: non members can easily pay an extra 10% on each shop. So far I've managed to sign up with fake details and save the barcode to Google Wallet, but it's all rather dystopian.
midtake 2mo ago
Looks pretty normal to me. The data is kept and used internally for business objectives. This isn't like Uber mining users for information on whether they had sex.[1] 1: https://archive.md/j5oLe https://archive.md/j5oLe
theropost 2mo ago
[flagged]
1vuio0pswjnm7 2mo ago
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

235 points by thehoff 2mo ago

tito 2mo ago

Anyone vibe code a tool to read the data? I wanna see what mine is!

tito 2mo ago
200+ comments tripping over themselves to say “I’m not bothered” and zero github repos to process 500 page datasets. HN letting me down!
- tito 2mo ago
  I requested my data from McDonalds yesterday. McDonalds sends a verification email right after to your email address to confirm. I confirmed and haven't heard anything else back yet.
  - tito 2mo ago
    Status - no word from McDonalds yet
    - tito 1mo ago
      still no response

haunter 2mo ago

https://archive.md/gkqRQ https://archive.md/gkqRQ

generj 2mo ago

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?

Grombobulous 2mo ago
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.
juiceland 2mo ago
If the concern is misplaced, where should it be placed?
- whartung 2mo ago
  The concern is when the data breaks out of the silos. It should not shock anyone that Amazon has an entire history of everything that you've ever bought. I would likely not surprise anyone here that they have a log of every item you've clicked on, or even moused over. The beauty of modern systems is that storing all of that data is very cheap. The dark side is if the fellow queried McDonalds and found not just his McDonalds trends, but his shopping habits from, say, Target. Where McDs and Target perhaps had a data sharing agreement to correlate customers. Or seeing a copy of his credit report in there buried underneath the stack of Diet Coke and Quarter Pounder receipts. That's where the concern shows up. Not the raw data, but the cross cutting concerns as the data is potentially more centralized. Perhaps into a company that you don't even know is collecting info on you. Some corp that McDs is sharing with. You request your dossier from McDs because you know they're collecting your data. But you don't request it from Company X, because you don't know they're doing so. Then there's the issue of handing the data over to the authorities without so much as a warrant -- different problem.

elevation 2mo ago

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.

oniony 2mo ago
I wonder if they monitor your internet traffic.
- Nextgrid 2mo ago
  Traffic monitoring for a fast food chain is dubious at best even in the unencrypted days, but basically useless since the advent of HTTPS and TLS everywhere.
  - hod6654 2mo ago
    They can still log what sites you're visiting by inspecting the SNI of your TLS handshakes
07c84979b3b5d7 2mo ago
> My only complaint is their firewall blocks the tailscale control plane. Brother, did you give your brain to AI already? There exists technology
- criddell 2mo ago
  If you have a suggestion, you should give it.
  - selectodude 2mo ago
    If you initiate the connection on your cell phone hotspot and then connect to WiFi, it’ll continue working.

nerevarthelame 2mo ago

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.

fluoridation 2mo ago
>the fact that it's automatically collected makes it more troubling, not less I don't think so. You can inflate raw data arbitrarily. They could have laid out on a page the decimal byte values of a one minute video clip of you waiting in line or something. Something redacted by a human would be much more dense in terms of relevant information, and much more digested. If it's just a data dump then at least it's information that not necessarily anyone knows, in the sense of residing in someone's brain. Information collection is also not necessarily malicious. You can never know what you might need in the future. I was kind of on board with Recall, if the data could live in storage in my control and can I could turn it on and off at will.
- Arainach 2mo ago
  > Information collection is also not necessarily malicious Anyone collecting information has an obligation to think about how it could be used in the future - whether by government or by corporation. McDonald's has also very visibly and successfully switched to gamifying their order selection with machines and dark patterns to drive people to higher priced items, so it's safe for anyone there to assume any data collected will be used to harm customers in such ways.

blakesterz 2mo ago

"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.

moribvndvs 2mo ago
At my first start up, I unfortunately relied on fast food daily. One night I pulled into a Wendy’s and the drive thru operator opened with “Hey Mike. Working late again, eh? The usual [my usual order]”. I don't recall having a friendly relationship with the operator or really talking to any one in particular, so this freaked me out and also made me feel a bit of shame. I stopped going after that. Granted, this was just a friendly worker but your question reminded me of it. Definitely prompted me to remove the Taco Bell app. I don’t need the occasional free bean burrito that badly.
- criddell 2mo ago
  One of the people working at the coffee place my wife and I stop at after grocery shopping remembered my name and order and I thought it was pretty nice to be greeted by name. They aren't there anymore and I miss it.
  - moribvndvs 2mo ago
    It does sound nice for a local shop. And I don’t discredit the worker for being nice in my case. I was however disturbed by the fact I was shamefully slamming that much fast food at 1 AM every day.
    - masfuerte 2mo ago
      User name checks out!

wxw 2mo ago

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

juiceland 2mo ago

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.

karmakurtisaani 2mo ago
It means you don't need to worry, just trust the mega corporation to do what's best for you with this data!
goda90 2mo ago
I see a lot of "don't worry about privacy invasion X, because privacy invasion Y is unavoidable." when talking about this stuff. People are being trained to accept "normal" violations
- rpdillon 2mo ago
  In general, I agree with you and I'm a privacy advocate. In this particular case, though, it seems like we're railing against the idea that a retailer with repeat customers keeps track of what those customers are buying most frequently and how much they spend. It would be very surprising if retailers didn't retain that info, since it's data owned by the company, generated by the core business itself, and useful for forecasting. I'm having trouble understanding the "invasive" part. I grew up in New York state, but my dad used to shop from a company called Cable Car Clothiers, based out of San Francisco, and he'd order everything by mail or over the phone. He probably shopped there for 20 years or more before I moved to San Francisco and I literally walked by that very shop on my way to work. He knew that my new job took me by their storefront and so he asked me to go in and pick something up for him. I had a short conversation with the shop owner who had a retail system that showed every order my dad had ever placed going all the way back to the late 80s. There is a bunch of derivative data that is available when you have a log like this, like the total amount ever spent, the most frequently purchased item, date of the most recent purchase, date of the oldest purchase, etc. Is it the scale of McDonalds that's causing concern, or is it something else?

deleted 2mo ago

[deleted]

owisd 2mo ago

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 2mo ago

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/ https://unicornriot.ninja/21st-century-jim-crow-a-series/). Honestly it's one of the more technically advanced things about them or any store.

criddell 2mo ago
I've seen a lot of stories about how Target's loss prevention staff will track thefts over multiple visits and don't get the police involved until the loss passes some threshold. I've always wondered how they are able to get convictions from a theft months ago with no evidence that you actually possessed the item after you left the store? Is it really good enough to just have video that looks like you probably stole something and an inventory system that they claim shows lost inventory?
- datakan 2mo ago
  Do you think the people getting caught are going to trial or just taking plea deals?
  - criddell 2mo ago
    I suppose also if they have video over months showing a pattern of a person appearing to steal it might be enough to get past any claims that you ditched the item before leaving many times over a period of months.
- henry700 2mo ago
  > I've always wondered how they are able to get convictions from a theft months ago with no evidence that you actually possessed the item after you left the store? If you steal a car and dump it in the sea, but there's camera footage of you stealing the car, is the camera footage not enough evidence even if they don't find the car?
  - criddell 2mo ago

nDRDY 2mo ago

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

rpdillon 2mo ago
Yeah, the discussion is not differentiating between data that's collected, meaning it's not their data (and so they'd have to ask you for it), and data that is generated by the business itself, which is their data. Businesses knowing what frequent customers buy most often and how much they spend goes back hundreds of years, I'd expect.

hamdingers 2mo ago

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.

bothers 2mo ago
Data has replaced knowledge, and the true tragedy of this will only be felt by our children and their children. But it will be felt keenly.
toast0 2mo ago
> 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. When I was young, they predicted orders and had hot food waiting, you would get your meal as you ordered. Unfortunately, after merciless teasing by other chains, they relented and only assemble to order and cook to order in some cases. Huge increase in lunch latency; ordering via the app can help a little...
- 07c84979b3b5d7 2mo ago
  Yes, I remember that too. They even had this one promotion back in the day where you could start some timer after you ordered and if you didn't get your meal in 60 seconds you did get something for free (was it the full order? I dont remember). It's been so obvious for a long long time now, but people still keep believing that smart things make you faster or give you a better life or whatever, but that just doesn't add up. It's just frustrating, often takes longer and the only reason it is there is to grab your data. There is no other reason. Edit: Found it. You did get a coke for free. Damn, 2004. https://www.burgerschachteln.de/2004/Sonstiges/index.htm https://www.burgerschachteln.de/2004/Sonstiges/index.htm

shpx 2mo ago

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

boscillator 2mo ago

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?

ceejayoz 2mo ago
They can see if marketing changes your behavior. "We predict he won't get fries until Monday. Send a push notification."
RevEng 2mo ago
Targeted advertising. That can be banner ads, notifications, featured suggestions or anything else. Knowing what your are most likely to accept tells them what they should offer. The goal is always conversions: turning ad impressions into sales.

whywhywhywhy 2mo ago

>“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.

xp84 2mo ago
Yes and no. Businesses like these succeed and fail at the margins. If McDonalds declines in popularity too much, franchisees start folding and the whole operation could absolutely collapse. All their competitors are looking for ways to exploit areas of weakness, whether it's "value" or "speed" or "quality." Most of the "loyalty" regimes are organized to work on the "value" side of the equation, since the only way a promo (like "free fries" that I received yesterday) has any ROI, is if it's designed in a way to bring in the "right" people who will spend enough money, and to have the way to contact them going forward to bring them back again and again. By contrast, handing out free fries to everyone who walks in the door is not going to be worth the cost.
- zbentley 2mo ago
  Franchise failure rates don’t bear out that being a real risk. However, McDonald’s is publicly traded, and investor pressure to improve at the margins may make a business that is fundamentally well served by being change-averse do stupid things.
  - xp84 2mo ago
    Other chains have had lots of franchises fail though. A&W used to be big. Long John Silvers. Are you saying McD specifically can’t fail? Or that none can?
    - whywhywhywhy 2mo ago
      A&W peaked at 2400 locations, Long John Silvers at 1080. McDonalds is currently 46,000, 13k of those in the US alone. It's just not even comparable.

skeledrew 2mo ago

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".

azhdanova 2mo ago

[flagged]

jsrozner 2mo ago

"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 2mo ago

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 2mo ago

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

christina97 2mo ago

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”.

OkayPhysicist 2mo ago
It's not the entire purpose of the loyalty program. The other reason (possibly the bigger reason) is simple price discrimination. McDonald's found that there are two distinct groups of customers: habitual fast food eaters, who go to their restaurants on a very regular basis, and opportunistic fast food eaters, who grab some fast food once in a blue moon because they want something fast. They found, perhaps counterintuitively, that the opportunistic customers are vastly less price sensitive than the habitual customers. The solution was a somewhat involved loyalty program, which is deliberately enough effort to set up to weed out the sporadic customers from using it. Now, they can charge the less-price sensitive one price, and their more price sensitive customers a different, lower price. As an added bonus, habitual customers are probably more susceptible to advertising/prompting.
- nitwit005 2mo ago
  I suspect there is actually three groups, because the app also has a sort of coupon-ing in it. The lowest price requires you to search the app to find a "deal" that is currently available, rather than just use your loyalty points to get a discount. One of the ideas of classic coupons was to offer a lower price to the most price sensitive customers. The people willing to deal with the fuss of finding and cutting out the coupons.

bawolff 2mo ago

> 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.

cortesoft 2mo ago

> 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 will come back anyway?

jen20 2mo ago
> What is the actual concern with McDonalds having this data about you? That they will sell it to someone else, who will match it with other available data to derive a profile with which they can do bad or immoral things.
- x0x0 2mo ago
  Or not just sell. Random state governments may be able to rifle through it.
- schnebbau 2mo ago
  > which they can do bad or immoral things Such as...? Lure me into a trap with a 10-piece spicy mcnugget that they know I can't resist?

zerof1l 2mo ago

I don’t see anything wrong with the general statistics mentioned in the article such as average order spend or number of visits being calculated with your consent. Curious though what’s in the rest of the mentioned 500 pages. As someone on both sides of the equation, any organization should be doing some kind of tracking and statistics. The bad part, and what upsets most people, including me, is when this information is aggregated across multiple services, gets attached to my real identity, and then sold to somebody. As long as this information stays with that one company, ideally is not linked to my real identity, and the company won’t sell or transfer it elsewhere, such as to an insurance company, I don’t really see a problem here.

tbyehl 2mo ago

Some time this year the McDonald's iOS app started demanding that I let it track my location at all times in order for it to keep me signed in. No thanks.

wrboyce 2mo ago

I did this a few years ago with a few companies. The most “interesting” was eBay, the data itself was predictably boring but they sent it to me on a USB flash drive!

tonymet 2mo ago

McDonald’s is likely the safest fast food restaurant to divulge your eating habits and other personal information to because they will treasure that data and never share it with third parties

tonymet 2mo ago

Aren’t we mostly engineers here who have been paid to build these accounting systems , so it’s not our place to criticize McDonalds for deploying them .

gverrilla 2mo ago

Oh they know much more than that. They're probably doing statistics on when you're going to die (=not a customer anymore) considering your diet, etc. Funny thing is this kind of "news article" is properly McDonalds propaganda.

FireBeyond 2mo ago

I say this recognizing 1) that I am guilty too of what I am about to say, as a Product person, and 2) that I still think it’s insidious… But there is definitely a slight logical disconnect between the levels of outrage or nefariousness at the actions being discussed here from a segment of the population who dedicates significant resources to building and having in depth product telemetry and metrics in the businesses we work for.

S0y 2mo ago

I'm personally not too alarmed by this. All the tracking is in the context of their franchise and I honestly find the stats pretty cool. If in the end it helps them to provide me a better service, I'm all for it. But I also never really was of the opinion that McDonalds was a large evil corporation.

HarHarVeryFunny 2mo ago

A 515 page file on a single customer ?! OK, so they've figured out the guy likes Diet coke, and is likely to come back, and what exactly are they going to do with this information ? I suppose they could send him a Diet Coke coupon, but they've already figured him as a sucker that is going to come back anyway. I guess they could sell his data to someone else - maybe Burger King would pay to get a slice of this fast-food addicted customer ? Really I don't get it. Sending out coupons is about the only thing that makes sense, but 515 pages of tracking ?!

recursivecaveat 2mo ago
If you want to push ads or "recommendations" I can see personalized data being useful. Almost every actionable idea I can imagine is only reasonable when applied to aggregate statistics though. Interesting how because there is no cost or fear in collecting 515 pages of personalized data, it happens, even if there's no dubious actual utility.
frollogaston 2mo ago
If anything, they might use this info to not send him more coupons. Most "loyalty" programs I've used have been nicest to me for being disloyal. Also, they're probably just collecting it all cause why not. Might be useful.
shusaku 2mo ago
McDonald’s wants to go to investors and drop buzzwords like analytics and AI. The point of 515 pages is to inflate their stats about how valuable their data is

Varelion 2mo ago

I'm sick of greed, be it from people, companies, or their data hoarding practices.

d_theorist 2mo ago

Shocking that the McDonald's app knows about your McDonald's purchases. This is - forgive me - a McNothing Burger.

xfz 2mo ago

Not exactly news, unless this is aimed at naïve teenagers who don't know any better. Personally I stopped eating at McDonald's 21 years ago and it's the easiest thing in the world to quit (although I don't live in the USA, may not be a perfectly fair comparison). Tangentially, here in the UK many supermarkets have upped the ante for people who don't want loyalty cards by introducing differential pricing: non members can easily pay an extra 10% on each shop. So far I've managed to sign up with fake details and save the barcode to Google Wallet, but it's all rather dystopian.

midtake 2mo ago

Looks pretty normal to me. The data is kept and used internally for business objectives. This isn't like Uber mining users for information on whether they had sex.[1] 1: https://archive.md/j5oLe https://archive.md/j5oLe

theropost 2mo ago

[flagged]

1vuio0pswjnm7 2mo ago

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