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.”
