These menu websites obviously track the living hell out of you and now they can tie restaurant food preferences to everything else they have already gathered.

A waiter recording your order is at a completely different, much smaller scale. Additionally, the waiter is an anonymizing wall between the system that records my order and me and will only correlate orders across multiple visits to the same restaurant. Not potentially across single visits to multiple, geographically highly separated, restaurants.

A waiter is not tracking your whole browsing data together with their 36763 partners (click here for the full list).

They may record what I order (although the cafes and restaurants I go to use pen and paper or just plain-old human memory) but that's it. Even if they enter my order into some system for analytics or what have you, there's no cookies, no tracking, no transparent pixels, etc.

Look, all these micro-arguments about the micro-invasions of privacy are 'bread and circuses' [0]. We've entirely lost sight of what it means to be a private citizen just going about our own lives without every nanosecond being tracked, without every damn interaction being an opportunity for someone to skim a cent. Any micro-invasion can be 'justified': it's more convenient, I don't care about a restaurant chain knowing what I've ordered, I don't want to talk to other people, etc. But they all add up.

Societies are increasingly unhappy, anxious, overweight, polarised. The gap between ultra-rich and regular citizens is widening. It all adds up.

Yeah.. old man, cloud. Whatever. The overall evidence is stark and obvious, it just hides in the tiny details.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bread_and_circuses