Comment by cortesoft

> 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.

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)

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.

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.

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 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?

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.

> 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.

> 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.