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> What is the actual concern with McDonalds having this data about you?

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.

And talking about that would make people concerned.

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.

But then that’s not McDonald’s using their data but selling it onwards for others to aggregate and use.

That’s the underlying fear and issue - and quite right.

Over the next decades we are going to gather and analyse soooo much data, and society will be dystopia or utopia based on what we let commercial entities and governments do with our data.

Not prevent them from collecting it because then all the good stuff cannot happen (epidemiology is going to rock in 2035) but preventing the bad usage.

I think a simple set of medical-like privacy laws (collect it, keep it locked down tight, use in the best interests of the citizen, do not sell onwards but share with licensed data brokers, introduce some cottage industry of data lawyers who can recover damages from dodgy data brokers)

That probably will be enough but interested in others views

Probably the most important single privacy point is in my first sentence - I said “their (McDonald’s) data about you.” Of course it should be your data. Data that exists or is collected by your action or lack of action, or delay of action or plain existence should belong to you. And selling it off for free email should be … hmmm discouraged. Require a paper and wet ink sign off? Something

The actual drafting of these laws is … we need a GPL for privacy

> Data that exists or is collected by your action or lack of action, or delay of action or plain existence should belong to you.

This seems a bit over the top? If you and I interact, I am not allowed to remember anything about our interaction at all, because that is 'your data'? That is ridiculous. You don't get to tell me I can't remember information about what you do.

If you come into my restaurant and then dine-and-dash, I am not allowed to put up a picture of you saying "Don't serve this guy" because it is 'your data'?

What is the value of this dossier to inform insurance decisions? Why would McDonalds leave that money on the table?

Why shouldn’t a company be able to make decisions related to your health with data about your health?

I'm not worried about privacy on any of that. Maybe a little about locations, but it's not like I'm randomizing my fast food visits to hide my tracks.

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)

I spend about $300 per month at McDonalds (after $50 from app discounts), and can confirm they don't provide better service or stop forgetting items in my bag.

Differentiated pricing is a future concern, but states are preventing that for now. The article did not raise any alarms for me about how my data is being used.

> 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?

They don't do this analysis for fun, they will do something with that information. At minimum, expect to be bombarded by special offers and other promotions if you should ever e.g. try to reduce McDonald's visits or do something else that raises your "attrition likelihood" above some threshold.

At worst, they could literally try to charge you extra by experimenting how much they can raise prices before the rate of visits starts to drop.

My main concern would be being labeled a “bad customer” that only buys $2 10 piece nugget or $1.49 fry or $2 breakfast sandwich. Same with the $5.99 Crunchwrap meal at Taco Bell. Or that using two phones and waiting 15 minutes gets you four coupons (which is easy when you’re next door and at a sporting event for an hour.)

Hopefully being a low profit customer makes me a cost of business vs someone to be deterred. I can imagine a someday where the person who ordered a $2 10 piece nugget gets the stale ones and the fresh ones go to the guy infrontof me who paid full price.

> What is the actual concern with McDonalds having this data about you?

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.

> which they can do bad or immoral things

Such as...? Lure me into a trap with a 10-piece spicy mcnugget that they know I can't resist?

Deny you medical care payouts based on your diet. Algorithmically increase prices on you. Increase your car insurance based on where you travel.

The answer to all of these things is legislative/regulatory, not forbidding McD from collecting the most basic information about what their customers buy.

The answer is both things. Legislation should forbid misuse of data with company officers being personally liable in the same manner as Sarbanes-Oxley, and should be so strictly enforced that holding data about individuals becomes seen as a liability instead of an asset.

That seems fair though?

If my diet is the cause of a medical issue, then I'm the one at fault.

Car insurance should cost more if I'm more likely to claim, that's how insurance works.

This just sounds like you don't want data to force you to be honest.

> If my diet is the cause of a medical issue, then I'm the one at fault.

This makes sense for drugs with strong correlations to specific medical issues. Alcohol usage -> liver failure. Smoking cigarettes -> lung cancer. Trying to generalize this to entire categories of food is farcical, because most food isn't bad by itself unless you eat too much of it without eating other things. And if insurance companies are given the power to set premiums based on diet, they certainly aren't going to burn money and effort trying to tease apart the nutritional nuances of every possible thing you could eat. They'll instead be incentivized to do the "easy" thing and impose blanket dietary restrictions under their insurance plans, and use any violation as an excuse to deny claims or increase premiums.

No, that's not how insurance works, but it's how they want it to work. Usually when you get insurance through e.g. work, you get put into a pool that averages the costs and risks across the pool. That makes it's more affordable and is why "insurance for a single person" e.g. for sole practitioners is not a thing.

Also, usually when insurance companies flag you for things like pre-existing conditions they don't just make it more expensive, they just deny it. Or if they do allow it it's so expensive so that it doesn't make sense to buy.

In other words, if insurance worked the way you think it should, there would be no point to it at all, you may as well just pay your costs out of pocket. Personally, I think that idea is 3rd world country level shit. Health care should not be for profit.

Or not just sell. Random state governments may be able to rifle through it.

That was my impression as well. The data collected is fairly innocuous.

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.

> 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.

As you should - this is setting terrible meal expectations for your daughter and fueling a condition that will severely affect her development. No joke - feeding her that garbage is ignoring the problem and making it worse. You should sit down at the table with her instead of going round the drive thru again, and get some interventions other than a stream of chicken nuggets.

>If they can use the information from my past interactions with them to provide a better service to me, that seems fine.

They can also use this data to understand how much further they can raise prices, and how much further they can degrade quality, before losing you as a customer, projecting that over their entire customer base to ensure they are providing the least their customer base will accept.

This is the facebook model, figuring out how much damage to the signal:noise ratio the average punter will accept before leaving.

> 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?

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.

Seriously!

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.

"Provide a good ENOUGH service to keep [you] coming back."

The "ENOUGH" is the essential word you didn't include. They don't care about "good". They care about your money and the least quality they can provide to continue to get it.

I agree, and I'm really against data surveillance. The data collected in this example is exactly what I'd expect, and frankly McDonalds should have the right to collect this. If you go to a local store all the time the owner will get to know your habits, this really isn't any different.

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?

Isn't offering app-exclusive deals adjusting pricing for an individual? I feel like that's the whole point of the service. You download the app and get something for it.

Offering frequent customers discounts or free things is a practice as old as the ages. The thing that companies are trying now is the opposite. They profile you and decide how much you can and are willing to pay based on your wealth, lifestyle, and other factors, then charge you as much as they humanly can.

I literally had my internet provider try this. I was moving and went to sign up for internet at my new address so I'd have overlap and not be without internet for any amount of days. Went to their website, saw the prices, called them up.

Well, they informed me that for "me personally" they wont' give me the prices listed on the website. Instead, the only option is a much higher price. I suppose I wasn't supposed to see those lower prices. I hadn't gone to their website in years and presumably the cookies got wiped, because after I logged in and went back to the website all the prices were gone, and it just said I had to call to get a price.

Airlines have also famously tried this, and the practice is spreading. It's consumer hostile and unethical.

I've had multiple accounts with McDonalds and over time, the discounts get worse and worse.

The hook you on the cheap Big Mac Meals, or $1 McFlurry, then over time they discover you actually enjoy Big Macs, so they give you less rewards for Big Macs, as you were likely gonna buy a Big Mac at full price anyways.

If you don't visit for a while, they'll notify you of a discount personalized to you, which is just on the edge of reasonable/worthwhile. You'll head to the store and spend money you would of otherwise not.

In the long run, the data tracking is designed to make you THINK you are saving money, but you are actually worse off! There is a grace period where rewards are good, you earn points and bonus points and you break even, but after a while it goes into a manipulative state to extract every cent from you.

I'll list some possible concerns. But first, can we agree that Mickey D's is probably not going to be a lot better at keeping this data secure than, say, my bank or government or insurance company? All of which have been hacked, repeatedly? Given that, the concerns don't need to be restricted to what McDonald's might do with that data, but what anyone might do.

1. By combining and correlating this data, a stalker doesn't even need to leave his chair to have a very good idea of where you will be. "AI, when is the best time and place in the next week to find my ex alone?"

2. Startup idea! A dating site that gives an involuntary set of ratings to every single -- never mind, every human -- within 50 miles of your location. Healthy habits on a 0-10 scale. Willpower. Financial resources. Willingness to spend. Emotional vulnerabilities reflected in external behavior. Litigious or doormat? Look up someone you're interested in, or give a rank ordered listing and recommendation of how to meet them based on their purchase history. (eg they spend a fair amount at REI. Or perhaps they spend a lot but seem to collect gear, never go on trips?)

You may be proud of the results of your diet, but you'll have to wait until it gets reflected in the data before anyone will return your calls. If any information is wrong, you have no recourse to correct it. And if an undesirable's data gets mixed in with yours, look forward to dying single.

3. Scoped to a single company having the data: a lot is about the asymmetry of the information. You'll be charged more, get less, be marketed to when you're most vulnerable or in the most need. Imagine the extreme: a $40 bottle of water at a concert or a fee to see a doctor a bit sooner when you're bleeding out. Only not that obvious, it's only a little bit at a time so you'll never complain and never notice (until maybe one day you will). The rich get richer and the poor get dead. We don't have comparable information on the companies to make them compete more or more fairly, and the Grand Opening of Jimmy's Burger Shack will need to convince everyone that they have better enough burgers that it's worth the premium price because Jimmy's doesn't get the Big Data boost that the McD's around the corner does.

And note that McD's is not using the data to make your experience better. It's using it to make your experience as bad as possible before it might cause you to stop going there. At least in any way that saves them money or increases the amount you're willing to pay. It's not even malicious, it's just the inevitable outcome of making numbers go up.

4. You really don't want to live in a world where everything is optimized to the bone. Your barista is stressed and pissed off all the time because they're doing the job of 4, which turns out to work enough of the time that only 10% of the customers stop coming, and it saves the equivalent of 11%. The only companies you can buy from are huge and surviving on surveillance and economies of scale. You have to drive your kids 45 minutes to school and 2 hours for a haircut, because having them closer together is inefficient. Not that your kids will be able to get a job without nepotism, because The Machine says that they cost more to train than the employer can get out of the existing single mother by forcing her into another shift. The world needs slack and long-term benefit, or we end up optimizing the measurable and pessimizing everything else.

Update: to be clear, I don't think McD's is being particularly scummy here. The question was "why care?", not "is this proof positive that Ronald is going to Hell?" With current legislation, they'd be dumb not to collect what they're collecting. I just think that this sort of thing can cause enough harm that a large group of people should work together to forbid this practice being applied to them. Everyone in the group doesn't have to work on it individually, we could pick people to do the work and call those chosen ones the "lovernment" or maybe something rhyming with it.

> The question was "why care?"

And the answer is "wake me up when those things start happening." I can imagine all sorts of even worse things being done with my data, but until they happen, it's just speculation.

Then wake up, they're happening.

Police stalking women with Flock camera data. Period/pregnancy data used by ex- and current boyfriends or law enforcement. Near Intelligence designed Planned Parenthood as a trackable brand, enabling location-based targeted harassment of those who visited a clinic. (Or more innocuous data leading to the same thing, as with Target predicting a pregnancy and revealing it.) Telecom location data used for roadside assistance -- as well as bounty hunters, stalkers, and bail bond companies. Grindr sharing HIV status. Cambridge Analytica. Avast selling browser histories, and buyers de-anonymizing it. (That data ended up all over; I haven't looked to see what explicit harms it caused.) Equifax data being used for identity theft.

What exactly needs to happen for it to be a concern? Personally, no, there's nothing too bothersome to me about McDonald's having my purchase history. But I don't want anyone else to have it, and since nobody seems to be able to successfully prevent exfiltration, then actually I don't want McDonald's to have it (or store it, at least, and associate it with me). Oh, and I'd prefer restaurants to compete for my business on the basis of their food, not their IT departments.

Let's at least try to compare apples to apples and not stretch the scope.

Personally, I find it creepy as hell. I don't want McDonald's to know if I've ever eaten at McDonald's. Call me crazy, but I don't want every person with a profit motive in the world assembling a dossier on me that it uses and sells.

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.

There are a number of small cafes and shops I frequent. The owners / people who work there know me, know my habits, and will know my order before I even ask.

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.

That's fine, but it's hard to transfer the knowledge in the store owner's head easily and at scale.

Hacking it is even harder

> I don't want McDonald's to know if I've ever eaten at McDonald's. Call me crazy,

You are crazy.

Back in the good old pre-Internet commerce days, when you'd go in person to a store, you did not have a reasonable expectation that the owners/employees will forget you once you're gone. If you didn't want the owner/employees to know, you'd get someone else to go in on your behalf.

If you don't want McDonald's to know, get someone else to buy for you.

There is a big difference between automatic data collection on my habits and local staff recognizing me. The later is nice socialy. The former is to my disadvantage.

> There is a big difference between automatic data collection on my habits and local staff recognizing me.

No one is making you install that app.

Long before smartphones were a thing, I refused to join any "loyalty program", for reasons similar to the ones you're voicing.

I went through multiple periods where I paid only cash, reserving CC's only for online purchases. I even paid most of my utility bills in cash (showing up in person at the office). For something as unimportant as fast food, it is totally doable.

If you want convenience (CCs) or benefits (loyalty programs), don't expect to have your cake and eat it.

I am more creeped out by an individual stranger knowing my habits than a faceless corporation.

> The later is nice socialy.

Not if they don't like you.