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- Hacker News
- A 515 page file on a single customer ?!
OK, so they've figured out the guy likes Diet coke, and is likely to come back, and what exactly are they going to do with this information ?
I suppose they could send him a Diet Coke coupon, but they've already figured him as a sucker that is going to come back anyway.
I guess they could sell his data to someone else - maybe Burger King would pay to get a slice of this fast-food addicted customer ?
Really I don't get it. Sending out coupons is about the only thing that makes sense, but 515 pages of tracking ?!
- McDonald’s wants to go to investors and drop buzzwords like analytics and AI. The point of 515 pages is to inflate their stats about how valuable their data isby shusaku
- If you want to push ads or "recommendations" I can see personalized data being useful. Almost every actionable idea I can imagine is only reasonable when applied to aggregate statistics though. Interesting how because there is no cost or fear in collecting 515 pages of personalized data, it happens, even if there's no dubious actual utility.
- If anything, they might use this info to not send him more coupons. Most "loyalty" programs I've used have been nicest to me for being disloyal.
Also, they're probably just collecting it all cause why not. Might be useful.
by frollogaston - Some alternatives to archive.md
No risk of CAPTCHA or geo-blocking
No cookie, no user-agent header requirement, no <center>, etc.
No Javascript, text-only
Option 1
Option 2curl -A "" -Haccept: https://www.wired.com/story/mcdonalds-built-a-515-page-dossier-on-me-it-says-ill-never-leave/ \ |grep -o "<p c.*</p><d" \ |sed '1s/^/<meta charset=utf-8>/;s/..$//' > 1.htm firefox ./1.htm
Option 3 Add CSP response header; adjust to tastelinks https://www.wired.com/story/mcdonalds-built-a-515-page-dossier-on-me-it-says-ill-never-leave/ elinks https://www.wired.com/story/mcdonalds-built-a-515-page-dossier-on-me-it-says-ill-never-leave/
Option 4 (no URLs, no table formatting)http-response add-header Content-Security-Policy "default-src 'none'"curl -A "" -Haccept: https://www.wired.com/story/mcdonalds-built-a-515-page-dossier-on-me-it-says-ill-never-leave/ \ |grep -o "articleBody.*isBasedOn" \ |sed 's/.\{14\}/<meta charset=utf-8>/;s/.\{12\}$//;s/\\n/<p>/g;' > 1.htm firefox ./1.htm - I don’t see anything wrong with the general statistics mentioned in the article such as average order spend or number of visits being calculated with your consent. Curious though what’s in the rest of the mentioned 500 pages.
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.
by zerof1l - At first I thought "building a 515-page dossier" was needlessly hyperbolic for what amounts to a printed PDF of typical CRM values from a database. It's not like a McDonald's detective meticulously crafted it.
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.
- >the fact that it's automatically collected makes it more troubling, not less
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.
by fluoridation - Is it not common knowledge that this is the entire purpose of loyalty programs? As far as I know, if you don’t give them your details and just swipe a card, they are not doing facial recognition and PCI stops them from linking your purchases too heavily.
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”.
by christina97 - It's not the entire purpose of the loyalty program. The other reason (possibly the bigger reason) is simple price discrimination. McDonald's found that there are two distinct groups of customers: habitual fast food eaters, who go to their restaurants on a very regular basis, and opportunistic fast food eaters, who grab some fast food once in a blue moon because they want something fast.
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 wonder how many of us would stop going not just to McDonald’s, but all the other places if we knew just how much they ALL have in our files. They're not tracking us to be helpful, they're tracking us to increase their profits."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."by blakesterz- They increase profits, so what? The real reason I don't go there is I don't want to deal with an app to buy food at the non-sucker price.by frollogaston
- i think they mean "crispy" fries, and "greasy" drinks?
- I used to eat McD’s once a week as my chest meal. Fries, coke, the lot. I loved it.
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.
by testing22321 - At my first start up, I unfortunately relied on fast food daily. One night I pulled into a Wendy’s and the drive thru operator opened with “Hey Mike. Working late again, eh? The usual [my usual order]”. I don't recall having a friendly relationship with the operator or really talking to any one in particular, so this freaked me out and also made me feel a bit of shame. I stopped going after that. Granted, this was just a friendly worker but your question reminded me of it.
Definitely prompted me to remove the Taco Bell app. I don’t need the occasional free bean burrito that badly.
by moribvndvs - > they're tracking us to increase their profits
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.
by criddell - Similarly this reminds of Target's surveillance system, which is loved and adopted by police and federal agencies (https://unicornriot.ninja/21st-century-jim-crow-a-series/). Honestly it's one of the more technically advanced things about them or any store.by tolugenius
- I've seen a lot of stories about how Target's loss prevention staff will track thefts over multiple visits and don't get the police involved until the loss passes some threshold.
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?
by criddell - What an awful article. Just spent like 10 minutes digging through a pile of ideologically loaded buzzwords and implied accusations of racism trying to find anything concrete the authors are accusing Target of actually doing. Closest thing I can find is a vague allusion to Target donating money to a city to fund security cameras?by Ajedi32
- >“McDonald’s secret sauce is really commercial surveillance,”
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.
by whywhywhywhy - Yes and no. Businesses like these succeed and fail at the margins. If McDonalds declines in popularity too much, franchisees start folding and the whole operation could absolutely collapse. All their competitors are looking for ways to exploit areas of weakness, whether it's "value" or "speed" or "quality." Most of the "loyalty" regimes are organized to work on the "value" side of the equation, since the only way a promo (like "free fries" that I received yesterday) has any ROI, is if it's designed in a way to bring in the "right" people who will spend enough money, and to have the way to contact them going forward to bring them back again and again. By contrast, handing out free fries to everyone who walks in the door is not going to be worth the cost.by xp84
- What is the word “but” doing in this sentence?
> 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.
by juiceland - Subtly normalizing the invasive data collection practice.
Or maybe not so subtly.
by opello - ‘… but contrary to what a regular person may think (that this level of data gathering is unusual), privacy experts know that it’s not, it is standard practice’by NoLinkToMe
- What level of detail is invasive here though? How often and which items a customer has ordered and their predictions on future customer behaviour based on that data?
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.
by somedude895 - It means you don't need to worry, just trust the mega corporation to do what's best for you with this data!
- "but" as a coordinating conjunction doesn't always literally mean an exception. Its definition is closer to "notwithstanding". The sentence is grammatically fine and does not imply what you are complaining it does.by bawolff
- I see a lot of "don't worry about privacy invasion X, because privacy invasion Y is unavoidable." when talking about this stuff. People are being trained to accept "normal" violationsby goda90
- > 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).
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?
by cortesoft - > 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.
by jen20