惯性聚合 高效追踪和阅读你感兴趣的博客、新闻、科技资讯
阅读原文 在惯性聚合中打开

推荐订阅源

美团技术团队
N
Netflix TechBlog - Medium
WordPress大学
WordPress大学
云风的 BLOG
云风的 BLOG
J
Java Code Geeks
V
Visual Studio Blog
H
Help Net Security
Engineering at Meta
Engineering at Meta
Hugging Face - Blog
Hugging Face - Blog
Microsoft Security Blog
Microsoft Security Blog
腾讯CDC
博客园 - 【当耐特】
B
Blog
Stack Overflow Blog
Stack Overflow Blog
freeCodeCamp Programming Tutorials: Python, JavaScript, Git & More
大猫的无限游戏
大猫的无限游戏
GbyAI
GbyAI
博客园 - 司徒正美
博客园 - 叶小钗
Y
Y Combinator Blog
MyScale Blog
MyScale Blog
钛媒体:引领未来商业与生活新知
钛媒体:引领未来商业与生活新知
G
Google Developers Blog
酷 壳 – CoolShell
酷 壳 – CoolShell

Futurism

Zuckerberg's Pervert Glasses Have Been So Publicly Shamed That Meta's Reportedly Now Working on a Version With No Camera Meta Is Using Instagram Users' Photos to Build a Universal Facial Recognition System for Its Hated Smart Glasses, Class Action Lawsuit Claims Sam Altman Now Trying to Gain Control of Electric Grid Top Chinese Court Issues Sweeping Legal Crackdown on AI Deepfakes Meta Releases Uber-Creepy AI Chatbot as Its Platforms Crumble Under Grotesque Child Abuse LG TVs Caught Secretly Recording Users and Scanning Their Homes For Other Devices, Even When Disconnected From the Internet People Are Telling Their Darkest Thoughts to AI Without Realizing They Can Easily Become Public Hackers Are Selling Stolen Scans of 153 Million US and Canadian Drivers Licenses, Which Very Likely Include Yours FBI Now Allowing History of Bestiality Among New Recruits The Transcripts of OpenAI Models Plotting Together to Commit an Actual Crime Is Pretty Chilling Flock Is Quietly Selling Powerful Drones That Scan License Plates From the Sky Man Wearing Pervert Glasses Films Himself Harassing Famous Female Comedian in the Middle of TV Shoot Sensing He's in Deep Trouble, Flock Safety CEO Says It's All Been a Big Misunderstanding Hackers Created a Device That Can Take Over a Boeing 737 Jet's Autopilot Without Anyone Noticing Man Covers Car in Special Wrap That Breaks Flock Cameras' Electronic Brains Scammers Tremble as AI Comes for Their Jobs Why Aren't Any AI Companies Watching Their Frontier Models to Make Sure They Don't Go on Hacking Sprees? Jealously Watching OpenAI and Anthropic, Meta Suddenly Claims That Its AI Went on a Hacking Spree Too OpenAI's Escaped Models Were Allegedly Rampaging More Extensively Than Previously Reported If You AI-Generate Code, Hackers Just Found a Devious Method to Install Malware Directly on Your Computer This New Meta "Advertisement" Is Absolutely Brutal Suspicion Grows About OpenAI's Tale About Its Rogue Hacker AI OpenAI Says a Group of Its Models Broke Out of Secure Containment and Hacked a Prominent AI Site It's Laughably Easy to Poison Open-Weight AI Models, Researcher Finds AI Browsers Can Basically Be Hypnotized Into Turning Against Their User and Carrying Out Devastating Hacks Meta’s AI Support Bot Is Giving Hackers Access to Other People’s Instagram Accounts Just by Asking Websites Are Spying on Your Solid State Drive The MyPillow Guy’s Entire Business is Being Held Hostage by Hackers Riot Games Denies Using Anti-Cheat Software That Bricks Hackers’ Computers The Trump Phone Appears to Have Already Leaked Its Customers’ Personal Information Through a Glaring Exploit
McDonald's Has Hundreds of Pages of Intel on Its Repeat C...
Joe Wilkins · 2026-08-16 · via Futurism

A photo of a woman eating a McDonald's meal.

Shutterstock / Futurism

Sign up to see the future, today

Can’t-miss innovations from the bleeding edge of science and tech

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.”

The result is the 515-page file, which contains “specific pieces of personal information about you that were identified by searching McDonald’s systems which contain information about our customers,” per the company.

For context, 515 pages is right at the threshold for a “large” FBI dossier. A file of that size is comparable to the Bureau’s profile on John Lennon, whose outspoken opposition to the Vietnam War made him a prominent target for deportation by the Nixon administration.

In other words, we’re now living in a world where fast food chains conduct the type of surveillance on customers that Cold War-obsessed spy agencies once carried out on high-profile political dissidents.

As Jeff Chester, executive director at the Center for Digital Democracy told Wired, “McDonald’s secret sauce is really commercial surveillance.”

The discovery comes a year after McDonald’s virtual hiring assistant experienced a massive data leak exposing the personal details of some 64 million job applicants.

That dynamic — in which private companies compile vast troves of personal data on people, yet fail to protect it — is both familiar and new. While we’ve grown to expect this kind of data vampirism from platform companies like Google or Meta, we’re also witnessing a notable rise in digital surveillance conducted by non-platform companies like Target and McDonald’s, and even some privately-owned buildings like Madison Square Garden.

Never before have profit seekers held so much personal data on private citizens. It’s a practice companies are unlikely to stop on their own: as long as data harvesting continues to pay dividends, they’ll never hold so little on us ever again.

More on fast food: Burger King Adding AI to Employees’ Headsets to Constantly Monitor Whether They’re Being Friendly Enough