He asked McDonald's what it knew about him. It sent 515 pages.

A reporter at WIRED magazine, Reece Rogers, did something almost none of us think to do. He asked McDonald's for a copy of everything the company had on him.

A few days later, a file landed in his inbox with the golden arches stamped across the top. It ran 515 pages.

He had signed up for the loyalty program years earlier for the same reason the rest of us do — cheap fries. He assumed there was some tracking involved. What he did not expect was a predictive model built to forecast his next order, and a conclusion, in effect, that he was never going to leave.

Jeff Chester of the Center for Digital Democracy, who studies this for a living, says McDonald's real product is "commercial surveillance."

Now, this is the point where a column like this usually tells you your privacy is under attack.

I am not going to do that, because I have never believed in privacy.

An invented right

Privacy is not some ancient human value we are finally losing. For most of history, people lived in villages where everyone knew what you bought, who you owed, and what time you came home. Nobody thought that was an outrage. It was Tuesday.

The word entered American law in 1890, when two Boston lawyers published an article in the Harvard Law Review arguing for a "right to privacy." Their villain was not the government. It was newspapers and the newly portable camera. Privacy was invented as a reaction to a new technology of exposure — which is exactly what is happening again now.

It became a political right much later, and for a specific reason. There is no privacy clause in the Constitution; the Supreme Court had to find one implied in 1965. The federal Privacy Act did not pass until 1974. What drove it was J. Edgar Hoover's FBI — the files, the wiretaps, the surveillance program exposed in 1971 — followed by Watergate and the Church Committee hearings. Americans got a legal right to privacy because their own government abused information about them first. The commercial rules came afterward and borrowed the vocabulary.

So when someone tells me privacy is a natural right being stolen, I do not buy it. It is a legal tool we built, fairly recently, for a specific problem.

But that problem has not gone away. It has changed hands.

The real issue is not that they know

Here is what actually bothers me about the 515 pages, and it is not that McDonald's knows a man likes fries.

There are two different things in a file like that.

The first is what you handed over — your name, your email, your order history, the parking lot you were standing in when you tapped "confirm." You traded it for a discount. That is a deal, and it is a fair one.

The second is what was calculated about you — your predicted next purchase, your price sensitivity, your likelihood of leaving, your worth as a customer compared to everyone else in your ZIP code. Nobody asked you for that. It was manufactured out of the exhaust of ordinary transactions, and it is often more revealing than anything you would have written on a form.

You cannot see the second category. You did not agree to it. You certainly cannot argue with it. That is not a privacy problem — it is an asymmetry problem. One party holds a detailed model of the other and the other party does not know it exists.

Hoover's files were dangerous for the same reason. Not because information was collected, but because the subject never got to see it, correct it, or answer it.

Why it's suddenly everywhere

Businesses have collected data for decades. Most of it sat unused, because analyzing it cost more than it was worth.

Artificial intelligence broke that math. Work that took a team of analysts a quarter now takes a model an afternoon. Support chats, voice recordings, screenshots, abandoned searches — all of it became readable. The cost of drawing conclusions about people collapsed, so the number of conclusions being drawn exploded.

That is the thread connecting a burger chain to the giants. Microsoft, Google and Amazon are not doing something categorically different. They are doing it with vastly more surface area — your email, your documents, your calendar, your photos, your location history, the speaker in the kitchen. And the newest AI assistants are sold on the promise that they work better the more of your life they can see. That is probably true. It is also a business model.

The part that should bother Floridians

Rogers lives in California, which is why this story exists at all. California law gives him an enforceable right to demand that file, and it reaches companies with roughly $25 million in revenue and up. He filled out a form. The company had to answer.

Florida has a law too — the Florida Digital Bill of Rights, effective July 2024. On paper it grants the same rights. Then you read the fine print. A company must clear $1 billion in global revenue and meet one of three narrow tests: earn half its revenue from online advertising, run a smart speaker service, or operate an app store with 250,000-plus apps.

That is a law written for Google, Apple, Amazon and Meta. It is not written for a restaurant chain, a grocery store, a car dealer, or the pizza app on your phone.

Which is the wrong fight anyway. I do not want a law that stops companies from knowing things about me. I want the right to see the file. Florida barely gives you that.

What to actually do

I am not telling you to throw your phone in the Amelia River. I use these tools every day and so does my team. The trade is fine. The trade being invisible is not.

- Ask anyway. Most national companies run a single privacy portal — McDonald's does — and many honor requests from any state rather than sorting customers by residency. You may not be able to compel an answer in Florida. Ask regardless. What comes back teaches you more than any column can.

- Turn off ad personalization. Google and Microsoft both bury a switch that stops them building an advertising profile on you. Four minutes, once per account.

- Audit your loyalty apps. Each one is a running log. Delete the ones you open twice a year. For the rest, change location access from "always" to "while using."

- Use a throwaway email for rewards programs. It keeps the marketing exhaust out of your real inbox and makes your profile much harder to stitch together across companies.

- Check what your AI assistant can see. Before enabling any assistant that offers to read your files and email, spend five minutes in its settings.

- Close old accounts. The riskiest file on you sits at a company you forgot about in 2016 — still holding your address and card, with nobody left to defend it.

The point

I do not need to be unknown. I have no interest in hiding from a hamburger chain.

I would just like to see what it decided about me — and I would like that in Florida, not only in California.

You cannot negotiate a deal you have never read. Ask for the receipt.

Deryck Burnett is the founder of Megabite, a technology, creative and multimedia company on Amelia Island. Reach the team at 904-430-0350 or megabite.co.