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 2025 Annual Report.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
You don’t have to be costumer of a specific company to become a part of their dataset. Meta for example has been known for decades to create shadow profiles for people who are not using their services. Even if you avoid a few of these companies, you cannot dodge them all. McDonalds is just used as a tool to visualize the issue, but your supermarket, your bank, your phone company, your car, your power company and so on are all doing the same while tracking you everywhere they can, sell the data to each other and from data brokers. Changing your habits can only reduce the harm, but cannot eliminate it.
With the current surveillance push they try to reduce the gaps in their data profiles. This aggressive move into areas where they didn’t have any reach before is more than concerning (and the reason why getting a non-Smart TV is becoming a real challenge and ALPRs are being pushed for so hard), because they are infiltrating the remainder of private life to reach their final goal: create a statistical model of you so detailed that they can predict your reactions before you are even aware that something happened. This is deeply intertwined with interests in politics and the tech bros into being able to create personalized propaganda while gutting you like a fish in every way they can.
The current speed of development in this area is absolutely fear inducing. This is the path to a fully automated, surveillance based high-tech feudalism where even the punishment for thinking the wrong way gets automated, so no human with their pesky morals can interfere. What we are currently experiencing is not new, but it reaches a completely new dimension, so reducing it to “this has been around for decades” does not cut it in my opinion.