A reminder that city council public comment meetings can be more like Parks and Rec than anyone imagines.
That said, showing up and making comments at local meetings can really matter. The number of people who actually participate in meetings like this is low. Showing up with a reasonable argument (probably not in a Darth Vader outfit) can have an outsized impact.
My mom used to work for our local city Parks and Rec department when I was a kid, in north county San Diego no less. She swears the writing team for that show must have come from a small city parks and rec group, because every time we watched that show she would say “this literally happened, I experienced this first hand.” Anecdotal, but I like to believe it’s true. People are just wild out there.
It depends on what your goal is in talking to the council.
Here, the goal was media attention.
If you want the council to actually engage with your comment - because it’s reasonable and not insane - then wearing an outfit probably will not help. Though I’m all for more Lord Bucketheads in politics.
I hear the complaint reversed far more often. The standard complaint is that city councils weight complaints from normal people far too highly. Only a small unrepresentative subset of a city's population will show up to council meetings to lodge a complaint, so that small subset is massively over-represented in council decisions.
City council listens to old residents with too much free time when they argue against an outcome you want. City councils ignore residents when they argue for an outcome you want. Such is the internet view on city councils.
> The standard complaint is that city councils weight complaints from normal people far too highly.
In most cases, what happens is they give a lot of weight to input from those who agree with the predestined outcome, and none to those who differ.
In these city meetings, all the decisions have been made behind closed door already (often with substantial greasing of the wheels), the open hearing are just for show.
My understanding is most of these local government "public comment" sessions are only done because they have to, and they'd much rather not, and stay as insulated from the commoners as they can. They certainly don't listen to or act on anything the public has to say, whether or not dressed up in costume.
Some of the collection is creepy, and I’ve largely stopped using mobile apps and loyalty programs myself. However, some of the concern seems very misplaced.
“Oh no McDonald’s runs a Customer Lifetime Value algorithm, a thing in use for decades and which has minimal privacy implications.”
“GASP the Golden Arches knows I like Diet Coke and has applied a marketing segmentation to me!”
Congrats, you’ve discovered they use concepts taught in Marketing 101?
Yeah, it’s 500+ pages, where is the surprising stuff? I assume the author of the piece would have chosen to list out the most egregious/shocking data out of the document, right?
I don’t think any of this is non-surprising in the “we’ve been conditioned to think this is normal” kind of way. This is really just a basic transaction history with extremely basic non-AI analytics applied.
The length of the document sounds scary but it also seems like it’s essentially a transaction list.
I would have thought the article might get into more details like location tracking like being able to predict where that person would be at a certain time, or maybe details inferred from data like “this person buys McFlurries when they’re on their period.”
Something scarier would be figuring our friend and family relationships, where relatives and friends live, etc.
I’m sure that could be done with data like this, and it’s critical that companies like McDonald’s keep that data secure and delete it when they don’t need it. We should have better laws in that regard.
At some point McDonald’s doesn’t really care about all that extra creepy stuff. Anything beyond figuring out your buying preferences is not useful information to them. The biggest concern would be that they would be willing to sell that data to someone else who is interested.
That’s where I’m at. I really don’t care if an individual business collects usage data like this. I have a problem when that data is used outside of that context.
Try to sell me more burgers and fries? Fine, but don’t tell my doctor, or palantir, or the government etc etc. I don’t believe that’s a huge ask as a consumer in the Information Age.
This is a very fair take. McDonalds is entitled to the data about their customers' transactions with the business because that's the business. If they turned around and started selling it to health insurance, I'd have a problem with that.
the vast majority of people have not taken Marketing 101, and it'd be strange to expect them to have. I know you're not literally talking about a Marketing 101 course, but the point is the same
I’m not talking about a literal Marketing 101 course, but I’m also not entirely facetious about this all being taught in a first or second Marketing class (having attended those).
I agree we should not expect everyone to have taken a marketing class - but I sure expect the author of the piece to have demonstrated some curiosity about some of the terms. And we know they did, because the author decoded them into plainer language in their table. So why present these elements as an abnormal thing for McDonald’s to compute about them, rather than something an undergrad might be expected to compute as part of a project?
What people think of these programs is often linked to the perception of the product being sold. If a cigarette company did this, people would be pissed. McDonalds is kind of an edge case - everyone knows it's not great for you, but it's not as harmful as cigarettes or drinking so you get mixed takes.
The classic case here is Target inferring that someone was pregnant before her family did[1] - so yeah, this is nothing new.
Where it gets "you really should care about this" are things like your insurance carrier using this sort of data (which is for sale to all comers) to, say, increase your premiums under the guise of "your 2 Big Mac a week habit makes you a bigger risk".
I don't want them to. I'm not giving them that data myself and I don't consent to McDonalds giving them that data either, where that data is something I have to McDonalds. It's about information asymmetry.
I would like to assume that people aren't generally so ignorant of how insurance works that they think the risk of eating two big macs a week could be accurately priced in and that insurance companies would not just use the fact of eating a couple to justify an unsupported by actuarial analysis rate increase.
Once again, my assumptions of people prove misguided.
Yeah I walked into this with my pitchfork ready but isn't this stuff pretty... reasonable?
McDonalds is just a restaurant, they predict what menu items you like and how likely you will come back, is that really a problem? What is the concern here? I don't use their app but presumably for those that do, isn't this exactly the type of data that would simply influence whether the app offers a coupon or something? Or how well a franchise is doing? Maybe also what to keep on the menu or how much to stock?
What exactly is the bar here I wonder? McDonalds has security cameras, it also has menu kiosks with cameras (I think?). The alternate reality evil tech-like McDonalds could have theoretically used facial recognition to categorize all footage of any given customer, then used this footage to estimate their friends, spouse, BMI, age, gender, ethnic group, attractivness, disability, etc. They could then sell it to third party data brokers for extra cash.
That would certainly be the kind of dystopian surveillance to get me swinging my pitchfork around, but this? Having assumed the worst I'm now walking away realizing McDonalds might not be so bad after all.
The concern is when the data breaks out of the silos.
It should not shock anyone that Amazon has an entire history of everything that you've ever bought. I would likely not surprise anyone here that they have a log of every item you've clicked on, or even moused over. The beauty of modern systems is that storing all of that data is very cheap.
The dark side is if the fellow queried McDonalds and found not just his McDonalds trends, but his shopping habits from, say, Target. Where McDs and Target perhaps had a data sharing agreement to correlate customers.
Or seeing a copy of his credit report in there buried underneath the stack of Diet Coke and Quarter Pounder receipts.
That's where the concern shows up. Not the raw data, but the cross cutting concerns as the data is potentially more centralized. Perhaps into a company that you don't even know is collecting info on you. Some corp that McDs is sharing with. You request your dossier from McDs because you know they're collecting your data. But you don't request it from Company X, because you don't know they're doing so.
Then there's the issue of handing the data over to the authorities without so much as a warrant -- different problem.
I recently got the slightly smaller sister (the Solterra). The Trailseeker is actually known as the e-Outback outside North America, and it looks it.
On a straight line full pedal down it will spin the front tires. Absurdly fun. Not as nimble around a curve as the sports sedan it replaced but I honestly tell people I don’t miss my old car. And I definitely don’t miss feeding premium gas to the turbo engine.
I respect the BRZ and Miata owners who frequently do track their cars. I can’t help but hope someone makes a small range but lightweight RWD EV that can whip around a curve for them.
The state as a whole does not have a financial motivation.
The interests of the criminal justice system on the other hand is heavily financially benefited from the current state of affairs. More incarcerations means more judges, more lawyers, more job security.
Moves to correct this are labeled as “soft of crime” and surely my opponent Congresswoman Y isn’t pro crime?
It’s even more ridiculous when choosing to do it Apple. It’s hard to think of a company with more legal resources and which is more protective of its hardware IP.
No. Steve's rage was justified, IMO. It was because Eric Schmidt was on Apple's board while simultaneously being Google's CEO and Google was surreptitiously building Android at the time. Mother of all conflict of interests.
There was a recent story that reminded me of it. Mike Krieger was on Figma's board and Anthropic's CPO, while Anthropic was surreptitiously building Claude Design.
It wasn't very surreptitiously, Google very loudly bought Android Inc. for 50 million in 2005, two years before Apple ripped of the phone that won the iF Design Award in 2006, the LG Prada.
Android’s original offering was nothing like modern phones. They didn’t have multi touch and they expected physical keyboards. Android added multi-touch in 2.0 Eclair in 2009 as a clear response to iPhone’s popularity
> Apple ripped of the phone that won the iF Design Award in 2006, the LG Prada.
Nice, albeit implausible story. Apple had been working on multi touch screens for a long time before that. They applied for a patent on it from 2004[1]. And TBF, neither Apple nor LG invented capacitive touch screens. Multiple discovery is a thing.
Depends on the objective of Apple. It’s hard to imagine they’re after a quick payout. They may wish to keep this in the news cycle as long as possible. I could see them both harming open ai and sending a message to employees thinking of leaving that if they even consider breaking their confidentiality agreements, it will absolutely ruin their careers.
doubt it - in the uber/waymo thing the guy got pardoned by trump after lobbying from thiel/luckey, probably a similar outcome for this guy since altman has trump's ear rn.
I mean, Trump turns on people in an instant depending on his interests.. he's not a reliable friend. He is, also, very thin-skinned and he (probably?) knows his base is extremely against datacenters. (It's hard to ignore that political reality now -- it's like the nations' most politically unifying thing!) Dario was in the admin's good graces, until very suddenly he wasn't.
I keep seeing this take in the comments, but why wouldn't Apple make an example of OpenAI? They can certainly afford to. There's no lawyering your way out of a case this cut and dry, if it makes it to court. OpenAI has already signaled intent to become a direct competitor to Apple, why wouldn't Apple publicly humiliate them before they can get that product off the ground?
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