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.
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?
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”.
> 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.
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.
"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."
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.
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.
No thanks.
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.
Great line. I do really love their fries though.
I mean, that is exactly what i would think a loyalty program would contain.
My only complaint is their firewall blocks the tailscale control plane.
“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?
Data is useful, but only to a point. A process-first approach (guided by clearly defined quality characteristics) is going to produce more meaningful and sustainable results: products and services that customers value more, lower costs and less waste for the company, and happier and more empowered employees.
That's what the end of the middle-class means: everyone is getting too wealthy to employ in near-menial jobs.
If they are indeed saying understaffing doesn't matter because their current customers don't care, their loyalty numbers will only go up because of that sampling bias. Relatively upscale fast casual places (e.g. Chipotle) will fill replace McDonalds for the customers they lose. The circle of service industry life.
Likely at a cost of other teams, who lack the political positioning, power, and prowress to successfully fight for their own KPIs and promotions.
When I clicked the article, I thought it was going to include, like, how many kids/pets he has or his wife's maiden name. But I don't find any of the information listed in the article "creepy". It seems like obvious stuff they'd want to track.
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...
Now? In the queue behind 23 other bespoke orders while they try and service the drive-thru as quickly as possible and nothing stopping them taking the burger that was made for me and adding it to another order.
I was so angry once, I walked out after paying and I just didn't wait for my breakfast muffin because the whole thing like the parent says is that they used to care about efficiency as well as customer experience and now that goes out the window.
"We predict he won't get fries until Monday. Send a push notification."
It also wasn't clear how much of the data they have is because he's using the app. If it is, it seems much/most of the data was in his control.
Do they think McDonalds (or whichever company) is going to spend a lot of money building an app and a rewards program and not expect an ROI on it?
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.
McDonalds is just a restaurant, they predict what menu items you like and how likely you will come back, is that really a problem? What is the concern here? I don't use their app but presumably for those that do, isn't this exactly the type of data that would simply influence whether the app offers a coupon or something? Or how well a franchise is doing? Maybe also what to keep on the menu or how much to stock?
What exactly is the bar here I wonder? McDonalds has security cameras, it also has menu kiosks with cameras (I think?). The alternate reality evil tech-like McDonalds could have theoretically used facial recognition to categorize all footage of any given customer, then used this footage to estimate their friends, spouse, BMI, age, gender, ethnic group, attractivness, disability, etc. They could then sell it to third party data brokers for extra cash.
That would certainly be the kind of dystopian surveillance to get me swinging my pitchfork around, but this? Having assumed the worst I'm now walking away realizing McDonalds might not be so bad after all.
Brother, did you give your brain to AI already? There exists technology
Try to sell me more burgers and fries? Fine, but don’t tell my doctor, or palantir, or the government etc etc. I don’t believe that’s a huge ask as a consumer in the Information Age.
The classic case here is Target inferring that someone was pregnant before her family did[1] - so yeah, this is nothing new.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-targ...
My concern is Goodhart's law.
"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure." Named after British economist Charles Goodhart, it means that once you reward or punish people based on a specific metric, they will game the system to optimize that number, destroying its reliability.
With McDonald's, this is quite clear. They have always aimed at minimizing the drive thru time. To support this, restaurants now tell you "please pull around and park in spot X", then they bring the food out.
But when you're in spot X there are downsides. First, you have to go through the extra time to park, which may be affected by lot traffic. Then, if they forgot the soda or a condiment, they have to run all the way back in to get it. They need extra staff running those orders from the back to the cars and the staff are now clogging the restaurant entry. They're even losing some of their HVAC with the main door opening more often.
Trying to minimize drive-thru time actually made the drive-thru experience less efficient and less effective.
So when I see a company getting data-driven in a way that doesn't really affect my privacy, much, I have a second concern about how the data they're pulling will distort their operations.
Maximizing average spend is one of those things. It suggests they're going to try to rejigger the menu so that ordering items ala carte is unexpectedly pricey.
And indeed, it turns out that the best way to order two hamburgers, fries and a drink, currently, is to order the two cheeseburger meal without cheese, because any other version of the order is a money trap.
This also gets you a fresher hamburger because it has to be handled as a special order and isn't out of the Universal Holding Cabinet.
But that makes McDonald's less efficient for anybody who isn't trying to hack McDonalds' latest data-driven menu decisions.
All of which is to say, I recommend purchasing citizenship in Mr. Lee's Greater Hong Kong while it's still inexpensive.
(That is, read Snow Crash, and understand that is the dystopia we're actually headed for - apart from the main plotline - rather than the Big Brother world people generally fear)
This is exactly the kind of data that every business collects and processes to one degree or another even without an app or loyalty program.
While McDonalds is somewhat benign, most people simply don't understand that this data can be (technically at least, legally is a different question) permanently stored. See the surprise in the article that it is now easy to store every app open. Almost certainly with associated location data. So McDonalds selling/sharing that is a concern, particularly with the extraordinarily lax US approach to data privacy. Data like that cleanly bound to true identity is very unhealthy. McDonalds is highly likely syncing that into facebook as well, which is generally done both via email and phone.
And if McDonalds is doing this, imagine what more natively sensitive apps/websites are storing about you. Medical sites, period / pregnancy trackers (particularly in light of the US bans on medical treatment of pregnant or possibly pregnant women), a whole host of health-related information; political opinions, etc.
Or maybe not so subtly.
Then my Mum got cancer, and my brother just said “why would you put that shit in your body?”
That was seven years ago and I’ve never had fast food or sofa since. I can’t imagine how sick it would make me feel.
I have no idea if it’s realistic, but I could see people being reasonably concerned about insurance companies, etc. making actuarial decisions based on a partial understanding of your dietary habits.
The red lines here would be adjusting pricing for an individual based on this dossier. Also, correlating this with data obtained from elsewhere would be really bad. Sharing this data with other parties would be really bad.
I think that would be the real story here. Is this data sold to 3rd party aggregators?
That being said, that's what they signed up for. What did they expect?
I think that getting discounts through loyalty programs should be illegal, because people aren't qualified to evaluate the value of the information that they're selling. If you want to do this, become a private club and simply don't sell at all to people who don't want to be tracked. Instead, it effectively becomes a transfer of cash from people who don't want to be tracked to the ignorant, and a transfer of the data of the ignorant to unscrupulous algorithms and data brokers.
It's not a coincidence that loyalty programs are mostly pushed in convenience store and drugstore chains, grocery stores of last resort for people who lack transportation and live far from a real grocery store.
> That they will charge you more if they know you will come back anyway?
That's certainly a concern. But that's a well known one that at least has some attention. But that McDonald's app knows your habits when it knows where, when, and how much you spend. Combined with 100 other sources of data about you, that might be the tipping point into a new way to exploit you. Hell, you mention that you started going to McDonald's more often and buying particular foods because your daughter is sick. Do you want that information going to insurance companies? How about to quack doctors selling miracle cures? What about PACs?
edit: that information could literally be used to deanonymize your comment.
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.
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.
I understand privacy concerns in many cases, especially when it comes to big tech and online privacy, or credit card companies, but this to me looks like a complete nothingburger.
Definitely prompted me to remove the Taco Bell app. I don’t need the occasional free bean burrito that badly.
That's not really all that nefarious is it?
From what was listed in the article it seemed like it was all data generated by the chain. If it included a lot of stuff from outside sources I would probably be put off, but this seems fairly benign.
I suppose they could be sharing that information with third parties and that could be bad.
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?
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.
I’ve used the app once - it was slower than ordering at the kiosk, I was bombarded by ads and promos, and they didn’t pre cook my food.
I get what you're saying, but a downside to what you're describing is guaranteed waste of food. If food is prepared based on expectations, there's no way that all the food will be ordered before it goes cold/end of hours, and has to be dumped.
Yes, this is exactly right. To put it another way: When we quantify something, we abstract away everything about that thing that is not quantifiable. So our thinking is only about a tiny aspect of that thing's existence.
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
So of course they delete the orders as soon as humanly possible, relying on the printouts stuck randomly around the kitchen to try to keep track, and now anyone in the management chain who does care about actual service time is completely blinded to how well or poorly they're doing. Even a manager who is out there helping, and can plainly see how slow they are, still knows the metrics are meaningless so it's hard to track progress towards improvement.
It can? I used it once a few years ago and they wouldn't start making the food until I was in the parking lot.
I didn't know it at the time, since it was my first job, but they got bonuses based on how fast they could make us work to fulfill those orders during certain times of the day. A backed up drive thru line would always get faster treatment than in store customers. Unless it was a special case, like a bus kid of field trip kids. I assume in those situations the managers could argue for their bonus based on the large amount of sales they got in store.
They obviously didn't share those bonuses with us.
I agree we should not expect everyone to have taken a marketing class - but I sure expect the author of the piece to have demonstrated some curiosity about some of the terms. And we know they did, because the author decoded them into plainer language in their table. So why present these elements as an abnormal thing for McDonald’s to compute about them, rather than something an undergrad might be expected to compute as part of a project?
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.
But instead the article lifts that McD knows your favorite drink is a large diet coke and you probably spend $25 there at your next visit because .. well you usually do. If that's what you bring up then no, nobody is going to be concerned.
One could almost think McD has sponsored that "investigative" piece to calm people down. As in: if that's the strongest criticism you can find, well, then it'll all not so bad after all.
Those people all have a profit motive, and use their knowledge about my interactions with the store to try to increase the profit they make from me.
I feel like that is just running a business. Every business owner pays attention to their customers and their habits. That just seems like good business, and it doesn’t bother me at all. I want them to figure out what I want, and I am happy to pay them a reasonable fee for doing that.
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.
I see what you did there
I agree, and when you boil it down, "keeping a log of what each customer orders, and doing math and statistics to guess what they'll do in the future"... that describes how every e-commerce operation functions, even going back 25 years. Of course there's a record of what you buy at the place you buy it from. The only reason there wasn't a long-term record like that in fast food in 1990 was that electronic storage was too expensive and paper storage just wouldn't be useful to do any later analysis on.
> they’re tracking us to increase their profits, everything else be damned. Including your interests, your rights, the law, morality, and long term side effects.
The last bit is unspoken but ALWAYS there.
It could even be helpful, if they know what you usually order they could present that as a "one-click" option rather than you having to navigate their incredibly tedious standard kiosk UI to order what you want.
Such as...? Lure me into a trap with a 10-piece spicy mcnugget that they know I can't resist?
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?
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?
The only counterexample I can think of is In-N-Out, which is always packed with customers and always has a large and very busy kitchen staff.
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.
I've noticed this at other restaurants too and have debated emailing corporate when it happens (since I'm guessing the manager of the restaurant also is on board).
It's not that I don't get _why_ they do it, but it just compounds the problem. Corporate will see the stats and go 'oh X employees is enough at Y hour' despite 10 people waiting for their order since it said complete.
Or in the slim chance that there is a line it's good. But I've rarely seen a number of kiosks insufficient to prevent lines.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McNamara_fallacy
TLDR: Making a decision based on only qualitative data, and therefore ignoring qualitative information and observations, can lead to bad outcomes. Not everything that is important can be easily measured.
In the DT you are placing yourself at the mercy of every order before you. A delay to the front order at the DT in a peak time delays every car that's entered the queue. Maybe as many as 8 orders. So a delay of one minute there wastes 8 human minutes of life.
At the counter, on the other hand, it's not serial of course, so a delay to your individual order affects only you. So, even by old-fashioned good business sense (rather than modern MBA KPI-optimizing logic), it's reasonable to waste 2 minutes of your time, instead of one minute each of a whole queue at the DT.
(Yes, you can park the delayed car at the DT, but trust me, that's not a sustainable solution to do routinely. In general, getting "behind" during a lunch rush is an extremely tough and frustrating ordeal for the whole crew, no matter what)
There is a big step between “we observe the behavior of user segments and predict that the company will sell x units at this time and place” and “these individual users behavior is such that we can influence them to purchase what they otherwise might have not purchased if we perform the following actions.” That is behavior modification on a large scale.
If you’re interested in developing a more robust view of this topic, I highly recommend “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism” by Shoshanna Zuboff and “We Have Been Harmonized” by Kai Strittmatter. They go into detail about what these systems are designed to achieve on a population scale.
People are concerned about the scale with this type of thing. I don't know how rational it is. It seems like people imagine themselves in a situation like Sandra Bullock in "The Net" where if an evil and very powerful entity wanted to cause you harm, boy what a detailed picture they could weave! With this, I both disagree with them (most of us are orders of magnitude less important than we'd need to be for someone to care to do that) and agree with them (it's probably bad if tracking is so good and pervasive that the few who have a good reason to be paranoid can't avoid having digital footprints of way too high fidelity to hide).
Or they're just worried the ads are too good and they know they're so weak-willed that they'll be manipulated into shopping too much.
I'm sure they already are. Can you imagine how much health insurance companies would luv to get their hands on such data? How much they would be willing to pay?
Target has footage that shows somebody who looks like you appear to put something in their pocket, then walk around the store for 30 minutes and leave without buying anything. Their inventory system shows that they have fewer widgets on the shelf than they should have. They say they have records of you doing this 3 times over the past year. Do you try to make a deal or take your chances in court?
I suppose you meant quantitative and it's just a typo
For example, McDonald's reported a full-year 2025 net income (profit) of $8.563 billion, an increase from the $8.223 billion reported in 2024.
When I first downloaded the McDonald’s app years ago, I signed up for its loyalty program hoping to get better deals. Why not get some cheap french fries? While I understood that this would entail some type of data tracking, I didn’t grasp how the information would be used to algorithmically predict my next purchase.
As a California resident, I have the legal right to access the data a company stores about me. So, I decided to request that information from McDonald’s to better understand what one of the major fast-food companies is collecting about its customers. A few days after I visited the McDonald’s Privacy Rights Center site and requested access, I received a 515-page file in my inbox with the iconic golden arches stamped across the top.
When customers sign up for loyalty programs, like the one offered through the McDonald’s app, they might not fully realize the extent to which their data is being aggregated and used in predictive models.
“McDonald’s secret sauce is really commercial surveillance,” says Jeff Chester, executive director at the Center for Digital Democracy, a group that advocates for consumer protections. 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.
“This report contains specific pieces of personal information about you that were identified by searching McDonald’s systems which contain information about our customers,” read the report’s intro. It was lengthy and difficult to parse, so I used a generative AI tool to extract key information before verifying details with the original document and reaching out to privacy experts.
| What McDonald’s Calls It | What My Data Says | What That Means |
| Estimated Number of Visits During the Next 6 Weeks | 2.16 | How many times McDonald’s expects me to return before mid-September. |
| Estimated Average Order Spend During the Next 6 Weeks | $13.49 | What McDonald’s expects me to spend per order. |
| Estimated Total Spend During the Next 6 Weeks | $29.15 | My total predicted value to McDonald's, over those six weeks. |
| Customer Attrition Likelihood | 0 | Potential odds I'll stop being a customer. Ouch! |
| Customer Group Based on Historical Transactions | CV2 | McDonald’s doesn’t provide details about what this internal value tier means. |
| Most Transacted Occasion Type | Food-Led Afternoon Snack; On the Go Lunch in a Rush | My two behavioral archetypes based on past orders. |
| Most Visited Geographic Location | San Francisco, Santa Barbara (61 visits) | The main market where I eat McDonald’s and how often. |
| Recency, Frequency, Monetary Derived Top Product | Large Diet Coke | The item McDonald’s recommendation math ranks as my number one. |
| Recency, Frequency, Monetary Derived Top Product Category | Wraps–Chicken | The menu section McDonald's expects me to order from. |
“McDonald's takes data privacy and security seriously, and we take robust steps to safeguard customer information,” a McDonald’s spokesperson tells WIRED via email. “Like many digital loyalty programs, we use information such as past purchases to provide a more engaging, personal customer experience—like delivering the most relevant deals, offers and messages. Our customers continue to have privacy choices available to them as outlined in our privacy statement.”
Much of my data report contains a detailed account of past McDonald’s transactions as well as offers the fast-food company sent me and how many loyalty points I accumulated. Essentially, every time I opened up the app to grab a bite to eat, it created a detailed record about when, where, and what I purchased. The log was even more thorough than I anticipated, including a record of every time I’ve scanned a code as part of its returning Monopoly sweepstakes along with the prize I received.
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). One reporter at WIRED joked that McDonald’s had created a Minority Report-style dossier to predict my next snack wrap purchase.
Beyond the numbers, McDonald’s also tracked a large Diet Coke as my favorite item to repeatedly purchase. It labeled my core purchasing habits as getting a “Food-Led Afternoon Snack” or an “On the Go Lunch in a Rush.” (Jokes about grabbing a “food-led” snack have now become a meme in my household.) Notably, the report also listed my “attrition” score as zero, which could mean that Ronald McDonald sees me as a lifelong customer who’s never going to stop grabbing french fries and a soda on the walk home.
“The 500 pages is kind of a wake-up call,” says Lorrie Cranor, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University and director of the CyLab Security and Privacy Institute. “But it's not in a format that people will readily understand.” 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.
| Rank | 10 Products McDonald’s Ranks as Most Relevant to Me |
| 1 | Large Diet Coke |
| 2 | Spicy Snack Wrap |
| 3 | The Grinch McShaker Fry Large |
| 4 | Double Cheeseburger |
| 5 | Ramyeon McShaker Fries Large |
| 6 | Buffalo Ranch Snack Wrap |
| 7 | Hot Honey Snack Wrap |
| 8 | Quarter Pounder With Cheese |
| 9 | L French Fries |
| 10 | 20-Piece McNuggets |
When it comes to this kind of data collection, there’s a stark power imbalance between the individual consumer and a well-organized company. “You're mediated by the technology,” says Ryan Calo, a professor at the University of Washington and faculty cofounder of its Tech Policy Lab. “You're going through their drive-thru. You're using their kiosk. You're using their app. You're in their ecosystem, and they have a bunch of people with letters after their names trying to design it in a way that maximizes profit.” Calo sees this power imbalance impacting users. Rather than benefiting consumers with sweet deals, loyalty programs can be used for long-term surveillance.
While many of the data points in my McDonald’s report, when viewed individually, seem innocuous, the accumulation of information over years creates a creepily accurate picture of my habits. “You eating this burger or liking that musician itself may not be private, but the aggregation and collection of this information, as well as its processing through AI, can create pretty invasive and personal information about when you're going to be there, what you do during the day, and so forth,” says Ari Ezra Waldman, a professor of law at UC Irvine.
Along with the right to request access to the data collected about me, I can also request that McDonald’s delete what it has stored. After rifling through the document, I went back to McDonald’s Privacy Rights Center and requested that everything be deleted. It always feels good to have a clean slate. Maybe, I hoped, this could be a turning point.
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. Not out of shame or even as part of an attempt to make healthier food choices—I want to leave it all behind just to prove the algorithm wrong.