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

https://archive.md/gkqRQ

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 will come back anyway?

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.

>“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.

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”.

  "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." 

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.

Oh they know much more than that. They're probably doing statistic on when you're going to die considering the diet. Funny thing is this kind of "news article" is properly McDonalds propaganda.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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".

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.

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

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?

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

> “McDonald’s secret sauce is really commercial surveillance,” says Jeff Chester

Great line. I do really love their fries though.

"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.

> 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.

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

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 .

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

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?

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

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.

[flagged]