cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/52451040
Predictive surveillance is here and it's near impossible to escape. My independent research cannot happen if you don't support me: / thehatedone
What if I told you that McDonald’s has a 500-page-long dossier of your personal life? A dossier that doesn’t just contain information about what you ate the restaurant but one where the company has followed you everywhere on the web? Where it tracked down your social media posts and spied on you from inside third party apps on your phone? It’s a personal file on you individually with your name, address and everything that identifies you and your movements. And it’s not just a historical record of what you did. It’s a list of predictions McDonald’s made about what they think you’ll do in the future.
If this doesn’t sound real or too much like from a dystopian SciFi novel, all you need to do is to visit McDonald’s Privacy policy website and request your very own copy of every piece of data McDonald’s holds on you. If you are a resident of California or any member state under the European GDPR law, you can get access to your very own Minority Report.
Not only is all of this real. The true scale and depth of the new age of AI corporate surveillance goes far beyond what we previously thought was even imaginable.
McDonald’s isn’t alone in this new surveillance scheme and in fact, they probably weren’t compiling these records all by themselves. They could’ve been helped by what is now a secret AI industry that is doing something behind closed doors that nobody has any inkling about.
They are collecting information on hundreds of millions of people with a new purpose. Not for targeted advertising. They don’t run any ads. Not for personalized experience either. They don’t have any users. What they do with all that data is to give every individual person a secret “consumer score”.
It’s a hidden rating that can determine everything from how long you’ll be put on hold during a customer service call, what offers you get or what rewards you’ll receive from a loyalty program. A retailer can use your score to fix prices you pay or products you see. Airliners use these scores to choose who gets a seat upgrade. Credit card companies can use these consumer scores to decide if they want to make you a counter-offer if you want to cancel your card.
Edit sources fixed thanks to @HelloRoot@lemy.lol
Sources [0] https://www.wired.com/story/mcdonalds-built-a-515-page-dossier-on-me-it-says-ill-never-leave/ [1] https://corporate.mcdonalds.com/content/dam/sites/corp/nfl/pdf/MCD%202025%20Annual%20Report.pdf [2] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/04/business/secret-consumer-score-access.html [3] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/04/business/secret-consumer-score-access.html [4] https://www.wsj.com/articles/on-hold-for-45-minutes-it-might-be-your-secret-customer-score-1541084656 [5] https://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/19/business/electronic-scores-rank-consumers-by-potential-value.html [6] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/personalized-pricing-has-spread-across-many-industries-heres-how-consumers-can-avoid-it [7] https://www.wsj.com/finance/investing/personalized-pricing-ban-9c0d92a9 [8] https://www.mcdonalds.com/us/en-us/privacy.html [9] https://innovationcenter.msu.edu/who-goes-there-a-new-whole-body-biometric-recognition-system/ [10] https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/05/12/1116295/how-a-new-type-of-ai-is-helping-police-skirt-facial-recognition-bans/ [11] https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.17206 [12] https://www.huffpost.com/entry/malte-spitzs-ted-talk_n_1701775 [13] https://www.ted.com/talks/malte_spitz_your_phone_company_is_watching [14] https://edition.cnn.com/2022/12/02/china/china-beijing-protests-police-mobile-signal-intl-hnk/index.html [15] https://cdn.vanderbilt.edu/vu-URL/wp-content/uploads/sites/412/2025/10/17195957/The-Loyalty-Trap.pdf [16] https://futurism.com/future-society/reddit-breaks-mobile-website-download-app [17] https://www.morningstar.com/news/marketwatch/20260401139/employers-are-using-your-personal-data-to-figure-out-the-lowest-salary-youll-accept [18] https://www.marketwatch.com/story/employers-are-using-your-personal-data-to-figure-out-the-lowest-salary-youll-accept-c2b968fb [19] https://www.ft.com/content/b127ee7a-5ac4-4730-a395-c9f9619615c7 [20] https://futurism.com/future-society/tech-billionaires-city-startups