What Restaurants Know About You Before You Walk In

> "We know more about our guests than we ever have before—you cannot have enough information. Now we have no excuse not to customize the experience [...]"

Maybe some customers do not want a custom experience? There might be advantages, but I guess that some customers pick places because of "the atmosphere, the general food and the waiters there" - so a too targeted experience could also be harmful.

This is nothing. A Pizza shop in Oslo was busted back in May for using Facial recognition software on it's customers:

> A crashed advertisement reveals the code of the facial recognition system used by a pizza shop in Oslo...

Source: https://twitter.com/gamblelee/status/862307447276544000

Best way to track customers is to provide free wifi. Log the visits by mac addresses, and you can collect huge amounts of valuable data.

Right now, it's high-end restaurants in New York City doing this. But they did that by hand in the past. The "headwaiter who knows everybody" was a big deal once.

The big change will come when this filters down to chain restaurants. Which way will Starbucks go on this? They already have an affinity card and know your WiFi information. "You haven't visited a Starbucks in 72 hours. Are you OK?"

> Just like you’ve studied their Instagram feeds for nightly specials, hidden menu items, and the most photogenic cocktail

I must be massively out of touch with modern culture, because I've never once done that.

This article sounds pretty extreme. "They've read your biography" to personalize your dining experience? I think very, very few places would bother with something like that. Maybe if you are such a regular that you know all the people there by name, or if you go to a very expensive restaurant where cost is not an issue.

Be sue to read though to the last paragraph, where the story becomes a bit darker (though not unexpected to HN readers):

They’ve read your biography . . .

“We have had guests come in and we’ve read their biography and read maybe they had a really rough last year or maybe they lost someone in their life recently,” Meyer says. “That may sound extreme, but all of those pieces of information are going to help us do a better job of customizing the hug when they come in. ..."

Not exactly in-depth reporting here, but I wouldn't expect much more of Vogue. In all honesty, I'm not surprised that restaurants you have to make reservations with want to know everything about you before you walk in - our world's economy is all based on personal information; the "customer" is the most valuable product. Heck, if I'm to be perfectly honest, I would not be surprised if there was a restaurant out there that ran reverse image searches on every guest; with the speed of it now and the huge number of images indexed, you can find out more than ever before.

However, my takeaway here is pretty simple: avoid booking a reservation over a website. Doubly so if they want private data, and triply on the same account from which you booked another table. Then again, I'm a bit of a nut and I like my private information to stay private.

To Survive in Tough Times, Restaurants Turn to Data-Mining (August 2017): https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/25/dining/restaurant-softwar...

It's going to be like eating at L'Idiot in Steve Martin's LA Story. There was a screen showing tidbits of live data about celebrities as they entered - how much their last film grossed, their sexual orientation, etc.

"You think with a financial statement like this you can have the duck?!"

I wonder if there could be an interesting ML classifier using information like this. Crawl a customers social media, track their behavior in the restaurant. Surely some interesting patterns will emerge.

Billboards track cars using the RF of the TPMS sensors on your cars and then make inference about who the driver statistically would be ....

It smells like this approach opens up a sort of attack vector. Eg, to wreck someone's experience by getting some false information injected into a target's social media streams in order to be picked up by these information harvesters.

Nice times when customisation and personalisation were things that the user did. Reading other comments here, I guess we need some ad block software not only on our browsers, but also on our faces.

Disclosure: I am the Director of Engineering at Tock. We power the reservation system at Eleven Madison Park which Will and Daniel own.

The notion of a user's past history with rich data has been something high end restaurants have been trying to manage either via spreadsheets or via custom crm implementations. What we have done is to make that easier through product design and machine intelligence to bring it to more down market restaurants.

It unlocks really great experiences for guests, avoids the need to talk about your allergies every time you walk into a restaurant and makes sure it is accurate and upto date.