McDonalds Faces Potential Class Action Lawsuit Over Automated Drive-Thru (theregister.com) 115
McDonald's equiped 10 of its restaurants in Chicago with automated speech-recognition for their drive-through windows. Now they're facing a potential class-action lawsuit. Long-time Slashdot reader KindMind shares this report from the Register:
McDonald's has been accused of illegally collecting and processing customers' voice recordings without their consent in the U.S. state of Illinois... The state has some of the strictest data privacy laws; its Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA) states: "No private entity may collect, capture, purchase, receive through trade, or otherwise obtain a person's or a customer's biometric identifier or biometric information." unless it receives written consent.
Shannon Carpenter, a resident of Illinois, sued [PDF] McDonald's in April on behalf of himself and all other affected state residents. He claimed the fast-chow biz has broken BIPA by not obtaining written consent from its customers to collect and process their voice data, nor has it explained in its privacy policy how or if the data is stored or deleted. His lawsuit also stated that McDonald's has been experimenting with AI software taking orders at its drive thrus since last year.
"Plaintiff, like the other class members, to this day does not know the whereabouts of his voiceprint biometrics which defendant obtained," Carpenter's lawsuit stated. Under the BIPA, people can receive up to $5,000 in damages from private entities for each violation committed "intentionally or recklessly," or $1,000 if each violation was from negligence instead.
The suit also claimed the machine-learning software built by McD Tech Labs doesn't just transcribe speech into text, it processes audio samples to glean all sorts of personal information to predict a customer's "age, gender, accent, nationality, and national origin."
Shannon Carpenter, a resident of Illinois, sued [PDF] McDonald's in April on behalf of himself and all other affected state residents. He claimed the fast-chow biz has broken BIPA by not obtaining written consent from its customers to collect and process their voice data, nor has it explained in its privacy policy how or if the data is stored or deleted. His lawsuit also stated that McDonald's has been experimenting with AI software taking orders at its drive thrus since last year.
"Plaintiff, like the other class members, to this day does not know the whereabouts of his voiceprint biometrics which defendant obtained," Carpenter's lawsuit stated. Under the BIPA, people can receive up to $5,000 in damages from private entities for each violation committed "intentionally or recklessly," or $1,000 if each violation was from negligence instead.
The suit also claimed the machine-learning software built by McD Tech Labs doesn't just transcribe speech into text, it processes audio samples to glean all sorts of personal information to predict a customer's "age, gender, accent, nationality, and national origin."
Re:Okay (Score:5, Insightful)
What's the actual reason to take McD's to court over this?
Here is the reason: $.
Many of these frivolous lawsuits aren't because a client had a grievance and found a lawyer but because a lawyer saw an opportunity and found a client. The lawyer can file a class-action lawsuit, collect a payout from McDonald's to shut up and go away, and the customers get a coupon for free fries with their next Big Mac.
Would it be cool if the drive-thrus just used touch screen kiosks instead of AI software?
Sounds like a great way to spread Covid.
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What's the actual reason to take McD's to court over this?
Here is the reason: $.
Wouldn't be easier to just spill hot coffee on yourself?
Re:Okay (Score:4, Informative)
Wouldn't be easier to just spill hot coffee on yourself?
That case was a bit more complicated...
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Maybe to some. A woman ended up spilling coffee on herself and wanted McDonalds to pay for her carelessness. The woman initially just wanted them to pay medical bills, but Mcdonalds only offered to cover about half.. She sued, went big, and won. McDonalds lost because they serve coffee hotter than the industry norm, but didn't have a message on their coffee to warn people. The woman made bank, and now McDonalds has a caution label to warn the morons out there.
I call them morons, because even with this labe
Re: Okay (Score:2)
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Nearly everything you say about that case is not true.
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No, it's all true.
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The coffee was incredibly hot, causing third degree burns that could have
killed her. McDonalds HA BEEN WARNED about the temperature at which that coffee had been brewed a number of times before.
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Um, there is no law that limits the temperature which coffee may be served. So, none of that matters one bit and any warning is meaningless. Nothing I said was incorrect. You could warn anyone about anything, but it doesn't change legal liabilities and also does not mean you're right.
To this day, McDonald's serves its coffee at the same temperature range, except now they have a caution label on their cups. So....
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Um, there is no law that limits the temperature which coffee may be served.
Not saying there are.
She spilled it, yes, but seldom is an accident ever boiled down to a single variable. If the coffee hadn't been that hot, it probably wouldn't have been as devastating. It is established that as a liquid gets hotter, the time for third degree burns to happen decreases exponentially. On top of that, the coffee cup, which was not the design we see today, was not rated (ACCORDING TO ITS MANUFACTURER) for liquids over 130*F.
And all she wanted originally was for help with her medica
Re: Okay (Score:3)
Re:Okay [is a vacuous Subject] (Score:1)
Can't you at least give it a meaningful Subject?
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Re: Okay (Score:2)
Re:Okay (Score:4, Interesting)
Don't you know that the Illinois BIPA Act is better known as the Billionaire Class Action Lawyers Benefits Act? All it does is funnel billions of dollars to Illinois class action lawyers. Of course they will never repeal this insanity.
I hope the judge points out that the lawyers are free to get out of their car and walk up to the counter. At counter they can pass over their written orders. Wouldn't want anyone hearing their angelic voices. I for one believe that responding to the prompt instead of walking away implies consent. But I am sure they will come up with some legal nonsense saying that is not true.
As for the touchscreen, it is difficult to get it close enough to the cars to reach. And then people would likely run into it with their cars. You have a rear view mirror blocking access to the window.
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Go read about BIPA [wikipedia.org]. This is just one of many cases under this idiotic law.
I can make a much simpler law. If you don't want to be recorded, don't speak into the microphone.
Re:Okay (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, it sounds like they've effectively outlawed the answering machine and voicemail.
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After looking at the text of the law, the applicable definitions seem to be: ... voiceprint, ...
"Biometric identifier" means a
"Biometric information" means any information, regardless of how it is captured, converted, stored, or shared, based on an individual's biometric identifier used to identify an individual.
So it would seem that McDonalds may be safer than answering machines, because it's unlikely they're trying to use the voice information to identify someone, which I do all the time when listening to
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You don't always know when you're being recorded though.
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Lawyer likes money, wants more of it. Most humans are similar, but one profession can file a claim in court for a bunch of folks who aren't even paying them and sometimes earn money from it.
Maybe he believes it will take a change in the state law to allow, but he'll surely get some notice by those who have issues along civil rights lines. As red state privacy bills are crafted by paranoid right wingers I'd wouldn't discount that it'd take a change in
Re: Okay (Score:2)
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They need the metrics to help understand when black people try to order.
I'd like to see the research that correlates speech with nationality and national origin. The Census bureau may want in on this.
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Welcome to Maddona's (Score:2)
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Quit trying to cram the rest of the "world" down our throats!
And, please read the comment" -- the poster wrote, "There are exceptions to everything..."
Re: Okay (Score:3, Insightful)
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Discrimination against race for employment or housing is a statistical purpose. While legally prohibited in many states and nations, age, gender, medical history, religion, nationality and caste often correlate well with job performance or credit risk.
order an broken ice cream machine at one! (Score:2)
order an broken ice cream machine at one!
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Order an oaken ice cream machine? You can probably buy one of those at a high end second-hand store.
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"at one" is not a saying and you made the mistake twice so you cannot blame a typo on this error
By "at one" I believe he meant "at a McDonald's automated drive-thru."
That was not an mistake.
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You have the best username on Slashdot.
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Ordering ice cream at McDonald's is always a mistake. They're frequently broken, due to the vendor monopoly by the Taylor Company and the profit of expensive on-site repair by authorized technicians for simple issues like accidentally overfilling the machine, which is apparently difficult to avoid and easily corrected by scooping off some of the excess in the main hopper with a clean container.
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The current status of McDonald ice cream machines is reporte at:
https://mcbroken.com/ [mcbroken.com].
Much of the time the cleaning cycle failed, for reasons that can only be repaired by an authorized Taylor company repair person. See the report in Wired:
https://www.wired.com/story/th... [wired.com]
It's a classic abuse of trade secrets to only lock in repairs with its expensive, on-site support staff. Like the diagnostic codes of modern automobiles, it prevents the client from knowing
Was any customer really surprised ... (Score:5, Insightful)
that what they said into the microphone was processed by a machine ? If the voice recording was deleted within a few minutes of the customer driving away (satisfied) then what is the problem ?
If they do to a 'normal' restaurant then no one will complain that what they said was processed by the person/employee who took the order ** and that that employee will remember the conversation for some indeterminate time .... so what is the difference ? I think that this will be an important test case as this sort of scenario will become more & more common.
** I do realize that at 'normal' restaurants the customer orders at a screen in-store.
Re: Was any customer really surprised ... (Score:2)
I think this is a lawyer who 8a testing out the law for their own enrichment. If it works, any business who uses âoevoice processingâ as in every single call center, will have to have written permission (before a phone call?) or face potential lawsuit.
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Depending on how the law is written any security camera system could constitute a violation.
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As could anyone using a cellphone to record video.
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If the voice recording was deleted within a few minutes ...
Was it? McDonalds may be storing the records to use as training data to improve the voice-rec.
I'm not sure why anybody would care, but nonetheless, that would be a violation of Illinois law.
But if there is no storage, then it is silly for the plaintiff to complain they didn't give consent for "processing" when they choose to speak into the microphone.
Re:Was any customer really surprised ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Considering the drive-thru intercom has always been a walkie-talkie connecting directly to a cashier's headset, yes they will be surprised.
The problem, legally, comes if they are storing the voice data to be analyzed (and probably sold) in ways that weren't disclosed to customer, and constitute a biometric ID. So far, McDonald's has declined to say what they do with it. That's why they are in court.
These type of laws aim to ensure, among other things, that we don't end up with a surveillance-based social credit system along the lines of China. (The only difference in the US is it would be administered by LexisNexis and the credit bureaus instead of the Party.) The patchwork of state laws against these practices is generally not adequate, and many organizations choose to ignore them anyway. I'm glad at least one of them is being forced to account for what their practices really are.
The funny part is, McD's could have probably just written a public statement about "We will never sell or voiceprint your data, we take your privacy very seriously..." to calm this guy down. Or, gotten legal consent for the data by adding some fine print to a rewards program agreement. They made a play, instead, to keep quiet about it and hope nobody will notice. They understand this tactic has worked for many other companies, and let them hoard mountains of data to sell later.
Re: Was any customer really surprised ... (Score:2)
I remember the Churchills. As kids to see the hundreds of Churchills roaming free. We'd feed them cigars, and you get really close to them so long as you moved slowly. My cousin forgot that one should always feed a Churchill by holding the cigar in the palm, with the hand open. Unfortunately he was also not good with counting, from then on having to use his toes if he needed to go beyond 7.
What is a Churchill? (Score:2)
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Since when was "You have a low user ID" an insult on this site?!
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Come on, you can’t say there’s no difference in customer expectations between talking to a person vs. talking to a machine. People expect a closed loop with a human to be ephemeral whereas talking to a machine necessarily implies analysis and possibly recording. People are going to have different comfort levels for those.
Well done Shannon (Score:1)
Anyway, whatever they sell in MacDonalds - a place I haven't visited since desperately hungry and facing an 8 hour train journey across Korea - this is a strike against it, and that can't be a bad thing.
If the courts buy that... (Score:5, Interesting)
If the courts decide that is a valid application of the law, then technically every cell phone company, every customer service line that has voice automation, and pretty much anything that either has voice recognition or recording that is not personally owned by the person using it is likely in violation.
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I would welcome a way to disable all that
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Slippery slope... (Score:5, Insightful)
So I first had to go do a bit of research on what all could be done with a voice signature and just how effective that could be. I don't know how McDs systems work, but I suppose if they were keeping all the voice data and then tying it to the digital transaction you could potentially build a database of people based on their voice signature. If they put up a camera to take a picture of the drive and add that to the database, you got some cool stuff to sell here.
If they aren't collecting the data, just using it and dumping it, or building a database of customer information, then I don't see the problem. If they are doing that, then yes this should stop.
They could just be using this as a way to attack McDs for using automation instead of hiring people. This is just the beginning.
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ahhrrMFBI-AHrummabuse aakaamprofilingarrh
Ohh, that was a really bad combination cough/sneeze I just had there. Sorry 'bout that,
So what real harm could come from all of this?
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Don't even need to do either. Just have a McD's app on one's cellphone. Some other fast food places do that.
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I would actually be okay with this one. Every single time I order a Diet Coke with no ice, and it's less than 10% of the time that I actually get that.
Learn my patterns, let the fucking robots fill the orders.
Keep three humans around - one to maintain the machines, one to handle customer service, and a third for sanitation.
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Not in Illinois, they want to continuously bombard you with tampon ads because it would be illegal to fingerprint you as a male.
Re:Slippery slope... (Score:4, Interesting)
It seems like the camera would be far more valuable for that purpose. You could take a pic of the license plate, cross-reference it to get an address and name (though you get that anyway if they pay by credit card). The only added value I can see to getting a voiceprint is to sell to other companies wanting to use voiceprint recognition. That may become something in the future (I hope not, but dystopian views all seem to point that way). But it would seem to have little to no marginal value today.
While driving cross-country, I stayed at a motel in a small town in the middle of the desert, New Mexico I think. I went through the drive-thru of a Jack in the Box at midnight to get something to eat. The person who took my order had a southern accent, which I thought was unusual enough that I asked him about it to make some small talk. Turns out he was actually in a call center in Alabama or thereabouts. At night time, each individual Jack in the Box didn't get enough customers to warrant hiring someone to take drive-thru orders. So they'd wired all their drive-thru boxes to connect to a call center in one location. That way one employee could take drive-thru orders from multiple Jack in the Boxes, and punch the order in and transmit it back to that store's computer.
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Duh, you pay using a credit card with your name on it!
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Similar to posting... my home automation system is spying on me, a thief could hack into it and tell when I am at home based on my electricity consumption! --- typed into your phone, which has a camera, mic and internet connection, while you were in the bathroom.
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Here in the Netherlands we're doing literally that. One idea is that elderly people will be easier to recognise and help, so they can access services using just their phone.
I couldn't find the link to that quickly, but I found this example of a Dutch bank aiming to do the exact same thing: https://tweakers.net/nieuws/18... [tweakers.net] (Dutch language)
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Aren't their literally camera's is like every store? If these laws and their interpretation are to be believed, every single security camera in Illinois is violating the law at a rate of 30-60 times per second. And if multiple people are in the shot, this includes employees who have not explicitly signed away their rights apparently, potentially many times this number. A single small bank branch is probably obtaining the GDP of the planet in potential fines every month.
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A simple fix for McD's going forward, is to only use the voice recognition that is triggered at the drive-thru speaker via an audio tone handshake the customer triggers via the McD's app. The consent is in the app EULA. The convenience for the customer is that they can then voice their order immediately upon driving up to the speaker and don't have to w
yes even the EU would allow that (Score:2)
Why not just sue on behalf (Score:2)
of mutes who want to use the drive thru?
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mutes who want to use the drive thru?
On top of that, their menu doesn't have a Braille version for blind people using the drive-through either.
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You made me wonder if the word "mute" may be on its way out, getting replaced by something else. So I gave it a cursory look and didn't find anything, but I did run across this [nda.ie] page which has a list of words that are now frowned upon. First reference:
Term no longer in use: the disabled, Term Now Used: person with a disability or persons with disabilities
So, I'd guess at some point "mute" will become politically incorrect and get replaced with "person who doesn't talk". Bye bye English!
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You made me wonder if the word "mute" may be on its way out, getting replaced by something else. So I gave it a cursory look and didn't find anything, but I did run across this [nda.ie] page which has a list of words that are now frowned upon. First reference:
Term no longer in use: the disabled,
Term Now Used: person with a disability or persons with disabilities
So, I'd guess at some point "mute" will become politically incorrect and get replaced with "person who doesn't talk". Bye bye English!
"Vocally Challenged"?
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There was a law firm in Los Angeles who did that for handicapped access in retail stores (mostly wheelchair access in old buildings). In the end, the entire firm was disbarred and declared vexatious litigants. But it took way too long.
security cameras (Score:2)
security cameras can gather a lot of that information more accurately. I don't see a lawsuit over them. Makes me wonder of the true purpose of the lawsuit. Could it be about jobs?
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Security cameras doing facial recognition are facing similar challenges.
Voice + License plate (Score:2)
MCDs is probably also grabbing your license plate data in the drive through. So they have license plate plus voice. Since this is a research project, its legal for them to lookup the vehicle owner from the license plate as long as they don't disclose that information or contact the people. See U.S. Code 18 2721. Much easier to know your demographics with your name and address.
Keep spying on me MCD, its making your food taste even worse.
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Why go through the bother? You just handed them a credit card with your name printed on it.
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I like cash. But yeah, same idea. This level of creepy is not necessary, retail of all kinds is really dystopia. They can also grab bluetooth and wifi signals as you drive through. There is definitely video too. You can deliver quite a profile in just a few minutes in the drive through. Is that really necessary to sell more burgers? Why is it all about data scraping customers?
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I don't think they are scraping all of this data, I think they are just trying to improve their voice recognition accuracy. I support that, who wants to order fries and get pies instead?
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This call may be recorded (Score:2)
Time to call up my least favorite company's automated phone system, and collect $5,000 for each violation when their computer processes my voice without my written permission.
They'll settle, become blameless (Score:3)
Seesm reasonably consistent (Score:2)
Once you realize you've outlawed phones, it's a lot easier to realize you have also outlawed all forms of conventional oldschool human communication. (At least email, SMS, and even writing letters remain legal. Just remember: NO DICTATION! And if you do write a letter, please scan it, expand or reduce the size by an random amount, and print tha
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I don't know a single person who . . . (Score:1)
. . . eats McDonald's.
How do they stay in business ?
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Because you're a freak of nature with very few friends.
Re: I don't know a single person who . . . (Score:1)
Great reply.
I can tell you concentrated on that for several hours, and I am impressed with the speed and accuracy of your one finger typing skill.