It might surprise you to learn that we’re now living in a world where fast-food chains conduct the type of surveillance on customers that Cold War spy agencies once carried out on high-profile political dissidents. What that means is that McDonald’s has been plugging an enormous ream of data into its own predictive algorithms in order to estimate various customer measurements, like how many times you will stop by and how much you will likely spend. Reporter Reece Rogers experienced being tracked when he uncovered a Supersize McDossier detailing everything from his past orders to codes he scanned from the fast-food chain’s Monopoly sweepstakes. The result is a 515-page file that contains specific information McDonald’s identified about Reece. As a California resident, he has the legal right to access the data that companies store about him, so he decided to request that information to better understand what McDonald’s is collecting about its customers. It turns out that they not only can predict when you’ll return and how much you’ll spend per order, but the potential odds that you’ll stop being a customer. While many of the data points in the McDonald’s reports seem innocuous, the accumulation of information over years creates a creepily accurate picture of its customers’ habits. The good news is that customers who request the data also have the right to request that McDonald’s delete what it has stored, and that’s exactly what Reece did.
