I don't eat at fast food restaurants often enough to be tracked, and I'm certainly not on anyone's loyalty plan, but I'm sure I would be very uncomfortable about the amount of information that...
I don't eat at fast food restaurants often enough to be tracked, and I'm certainly not on anyone's loyalty plan, but I'm sure I would be very uncomfortable about the amount of information that Amazon has on me.
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.
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.
Heres a fun personal fact about me, I actually stopped eating at McDonald’s before I became a health nut entirely because of their appification and invasive data harvesting practices. They are...
Heres a fun personal fact about me, I actually stopped eating at McDonald’s before I became a health nut entirely because of their appification and invasive data harvesting practices. They are very much not operating for the public good.
I don't eat at fast food restaurants often enough to be tracked, and I'm certainly not on anyone's loyalty plan, but I'm sure I would be very uncomfortable about the amount of information that Amazon has on me.
Heres a fun personal fact about me, I actually stopped eating at McDonald’s before I became a health nut entirely because of their appification and invasive data harvesting practices. They are very much not operating for the public good.