Your McDonald’s File is Probably Bigger Than Your FBI File
There is a massive dossier of all of your activity and behaviors used to create a detailed profile that predicts your behavior. And it’s not the intelligence agencies or law enforcement collecting it: it’s McDonald’s. McDonald’s has a dedicated Privacy Rights Center where customers can submit a request to gain access to what the company has collected over the years and how it is using it.
- ▪There is a massive dossier of all of your activity and behaviors used to create a detailed profile that predicts your behavior.
- ▪And it’s not the intelligence agencies or law enforcement collecting it: it’s McDonald’s.
- ▪McDonald’s has a dedicated Privacy Rights Center where customers can submit a request to gain access to what the company has collected over the years and how it is using it.
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Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | Gizmodo |
| Canonical URL | https://gizmodo.com/your-mcdonalds-file-is-probably-bigger-than-your-fbi-file-2000797829 |
| Publication time | Wed, 12 Aug 2026 18:30:52 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-08-12T18:31:37.579Z |
| Last seen | 2026-08-12T18:31:37.579Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | d5O8Hfvjjxv2 · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
There is a massive dossier of all of your activity and behaviors used to create a detailed profile that predicts your behavior. And it’s not the intelligence agencies or law enforcement collecting it: it’s McDonald’s. Wired reporter Reece Rogers requested the information that the fast food giant had stashed on him, and received a 515-page report that included predictions on how often he’d frequent the restaurant, when and where he was most likely to visit, and what he was most likely to…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Gizmodo.
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