That's scary stuff. If I ate at McDonald's, that would be enough to make me stop.
But by "scary", I refer mostly to the outright purchase of a data mining company, and they're already talking about intrusive surveillance such as using license plate readers.
They're also being pretty up-front about wanting to use this to straight-up manipulate people. I don't know whether to give them credit for honesty or not (since all the cool kids are manipulating people these days), but it makes me recoil nonetheless.
If you drive onto their property, and McDonald's Corporation is almost always the landlord of a franchised store, are they really intruding on your privacy?
Which is precisely why these systems will mean that I won't go onto their property.
And as a result, everyone gets hotter fries?
I don't see why having Math help make better decisions is a bad thing.
It isn't. But collecting unnecessary data and using it to manipulate people certainly is.