Their job is to provide me a good service that makes me want to keep coming back and giving them my …

> 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.

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.

> 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…

> 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 nee…

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…

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.