McDonald’s compiled a 515-page dossier on one of its loyalty-program customers — using years of fast-food purchases to predict how often he would return, how much he would spend and even what he was likely to order.
Reece Rogers, a journalist for Condé Nast-owned Wired magazine, discovered the extensive digital profile after requesting the personal data McDonald’s had stored about him.
The file revealed a “Minority Report”-style trove of predictions about his future behavior, including that he would visit McDonald’s 2.16 times over the next six weeks and spend an average of $13.49 per order.
The fast-food giant calculated Rogers would spend a total of $29.15 over that six-week stretch, according to the report.
The dossier ranked a Large Diet Coke as Rogers’ most relevant product based on his past behavior, followed by a Spicy Snack Wrap and The Grinch McShaker Fry Large.
It also slotted his eating habits into oddly specific behavioral categories, including “Food-Led Afternoon Snack” and “On the Go Lunch in a Rush.”
McDonald’s also assigned Rogers a “Customer Attrition Likelihood” of zero — suggesting the company’s algorithm saw little chance that he would stop patronizing the Golden Arches.
The massive file contained a detailed history of Rogers’ transactions, the offers McDonald’s sent him and the loyalty points he accumulated.
It even kept track of every time he scanned a code while participating in the chain’s Monopoly sweepstakes — along with the prize he received.
“McDonald’s takes data privacy and security seriously, and we take robust steps to safeguard customer information,” a McDonald’s spokesperson told Wired.
“Like many digital loyalty programs, we use information such as past purchases to provide a more engaging, personal customer experience—like delivering the most relevant deals, offers and messages,” the spokesperson added.
“Our customers continue to have privacy choices available to them as outlined in our privacy statement.”
Rogers said he understood when he joined the loyalty program that McDonald’s would engage in some form of data tracking.
But he said he hadn’t grasped the extent to which the information could be aggregated and fed into algorithms designed to forecast his future purchases.
After poring over the dossier, Rogers returned to McDonald’s Privacy Rights Center and requested that the company delete the information it had stored about him.
He also vowed to quit McDonald’s — in part to see whether he could prove its algorithm wrong.
The Post has sought comment from Rogers and McDonald’s.
Stephanie T. Nguyen, a senior fellow at Columbia Law School’s Center for Law and the Economy and former chief technologist at the Federal Trade Commission, told The Post she was not surprised by the breadth of the McDonald’s dossier, given what the company publicly says about its data practices.
“If you study the McDonald’s nearly 10,000-word privacy policy, it notes how the company can monitor a customer’s precise geolocation, their browsing history, their app interactions, and their social media activity,” Nguyen said.
“They also publicly say they use this data to train its AI models and build profiles on its customers,” she added.
Nguyen said she was particularly struck by the types of characteristics McDonald’s says it can predict about consumers.
“They say that they can predict a consumer’s preferences, their characteristics, their psychological trends, their predispositions, their behavior, their attitudes,” Nguyen said. “They even say intelligence abilities and aptitudes.”
“How is McDonald’s leveraging these psychological profiles about your intelligence and aptitudes to drive repeat customer engagement over time?” she asked.
Joseph Turow, a professor emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication and author of “The Problem with Personalization,” said the 515-page dossier “boggles the mind. I mean, that’s AI going crazy.”
Still, Turow added that it’s emblematic of a much broader shift toward increasingly individualized marketing, with consumers mostly unaware of the extent of the profiling that’s occurring behind the scenes.
“We ought to be concerned globally. This is one case,” Turow said. “Imagine this going on in, you know, hundreds and hundreds of retailers across the United States, right? This is not a one-off.”
Turow described the broader trend as “extreme personalization,” in which companies seek to develop increasingly individualized relationships with their customers.
“McDonald’s goal is to make its relationship with you so personalized that you will see yourself in their relationship with you,” he said.
