McDonald’s Built a 515-Page Dossier on Me, and It Says I’ll Never Stop Eating There

McDonald's built a 515-page dossier on me,

and it says I'll never stop eating there.

As a California resident, I have the legal right

to access the data a company stores about me.

Other states also have data privacy laws

and similar rights exist in the UK

and the EU, so it's worth checking on the privacy rules

where you live.

After I requested my data from McDonald's,

I received the 515-page file in my inbox a few days later.

The sheer amount of data McDonald's had collected

over the years initially caught me off guard,

but what was more surprising was

what their predictive algorithms were doing with it.

Turns out Ronald McDonald had been keeping tabs on me.

Here's what he knew.

The dossier estimated I'd visit 2.16 times

before mid-September and spend exactly $29.15.

It labeled my core behaviors as a food-led afternoon snack

and an on-the-go lunch in a rush,

which my household naturally refuses to let me live down.

It also put my customer attrition likelihood at zero,

likely meaning McDonald's believes

that I will absolutely come crawling back

for another large Diet Coke.

All right, but there's a bigger issue here:

the power imbalance between a customer

and a company collecting all this data.

A McDonald's spokesperson told Wired,

the company takes data privacy and security seriously

and uses information like past purchases

to provide more personalized deals, offers, and messages.

Much of my 515-page report was a detailed history

of my McDonald's habits.

Every time I opened the app to grab a bite to eat,

it created a detailed record of when I went, where I went,

and what I purchased.

A professor at the University of Washington I spoke to sees

this power imbalance as impacting users,

saying that rather than benefiting customers

with sweet deals,

loyalty programs can be used for long-term surveillance.

While many of the data points in my McDonald's report

when viewed individually seem innocuous,

the accumulation of information over years creates

a creepily accurate picture of my habits.

Aggregating that information

and processing it with AI can go beyond counting my fries

and reveal things like where I'm likely to be,

what I'm doing, and how I spend my day.

If you want to see what McDonald's has on you too,

search online for McDonald's Privacy Rights Center.

In the end, I asked McDonald's

to delete the data it had collected on me,

and despite my love of crispy Diet Cokes

and greasy French fries, I'm leaving them all behind;

not out of shame or some newfound desire

to make healthier choices,

I just want to prove the algorithm wrong.