For most people, the mental calculation to grab a meal from McDonald’s is pretty simple: it’s relatively cheap, fast, and goes down easy, even if it doesn’t always feel so good afterward. For McDonald’s, however, the question of how to keep a customer coming back is far more complicated — apparently requiring an expansive web of corporate surveillance.
That’s the stunning revelation from Wired reporter Reece Rogers, who recently uncovered a Supersize McDossier detailing everything from past orders to loyalty points, and even the codes he scanned from the fast food chain’s Monopoly sweepstakes.
Evidently, McDonald’s has been plugging this enormous ream of data into its own predictive algorithms, in order to estimate various customer metrics, like how many times Rogers is expected to stop by in the next few weeks to his total predicted dollar value as a customer.
Because he’s a California resident, Rogers has a legal right to access data compiled on him by a private company. To better understand what kind of data McDonald’s had on him, Rogers requested a copy of his report from the company’s Privacy Rights Center, which contains a form customers can theoretically use to “exercise your privacy rights at any time.”
The result is the 515-page file, which contains “specific pieces of personal information about you that were identified by searching McDonald’s systems which contain information about our customers,” per the company.
For context, 515 pages is right at the threshold for a “large” FBI dossier. A file of that size is comparable to the Bureau’s profile on John Lennon, whose outspoken opposition to the Vietnam War made him a prominent target for deportation by the Nixon administration.
In other words, we’re now living in a world where fast food chains conduct the type of surveillance on customers that Cold War-obsessed spy agencies once carried out on high-profile political dissidents.
As Jeff Chester, executive director at the Center for Digital Democracy told Wired, “McDonald’s secret sauce is really commercial surveillance.”
The discovery comes a year after McDonald’s virtual hiring assistant experienced a massive data leak exposing the personal details of some 64 million job applicants.
That dynamic — in which private companies compile vast troves of personal data on people, yet fail to protect it — is both familiar and new. While we’ve grown to expect this kind of data vampirism from platform companies like Google or Meta, we’re also witnessing a notable rise in digital surveillance conducted by non-platform companies like Target and McDonald’s, and even some privately-owned buildings like Madison Square Garden.
Never before have profit seekers held so much personal data on private citizens. It’s a practice companies are unlikely to stop on their own: as long as data harvesting continues to pay dividends, they’ll never hold so little on us ever again.
More on fast food: Burger King Adding AI to Employees’ Headsets to Constantly Monitor Whether They’re Being Friendly Enough