Recently, the fast food tycoon McDonald’s acquired the machine learning start-up Dynamic Yield. With this new technology, they plan to begin utilizing external factors such as time of day, weather, season, and other customer ordering patterns in order to offer suggestions and recommendations to customers. In addition, some locations are testing the utilization of computer vision to scan the license plates of vehicles to pull up customer ordering history. With the utilization of dynamic menus and access to customer history, McDonald’s gains a large amount of flexibility in what they advertise to individual customers. McDonald’s said they believe this new tactic will allow lines to move faster and ultimately, increase customer satisfaction.
However, many people did not like the new idea, and critics have complained that adding personalization to the fast food industry is unnecessary. Data privacy and security have become an increasingly important issue to many Americans, as they now are starting to realize all the data companies have collected about them. Companies are shifting from broad marketing tactics to utilizing the knowledge of individual customers. With such personalized knowledge, companies are able to exploit the preferences and interests of individuals in order to make more money. Of course, even prior to the implementation of machine learning algorithms, companies, such as McDonald’s have started to see an increase in money spent per order through the usage of non-learning algorithms. Presenting the right item to the customer at the right time will surely cause the customer to spend more money.
The problem that faces customers right now is where will the line be drawn. Each time a company begins collecting a new form of data on a customer, individual privacy decreases. Twitter recently released a statement saying they will no longer allow political advertising on their platform. Furthermore, San Francisco was the first US city to ban facial recognition technologies. These two groups exemplify a firm understanding of the limitations of technology and acted upon their understanding. It is no secret that many of these cutting-edge technologies can offer supreme customer experiences and drastically increase comfort, but at the same time, individual privacy behaves inversely proportional to data collection. Rules need to be established on what companies can and cannot collect from consumers. Without these rules, companies will continue encroaching upon personal privacy, and before long, individuals will not be able to perform any action without it being tracked by companies. Although comfort is a nice luxury, we must recognize once privacy is lost it is not easily regained. As a society, we must own our right to privacy and develop a firm limit on what companies can collect before we lose personal privacy all together.