Oct 15, 2021Confirmed
McDonald's AI Drive-Thru Allegedly Collected Biometric Customer Data without Consent, Violating BIPA
Rogue: Caused harmAI loose in the worldData exfiltrationDERIVED
Approved by person, Oct 11, 2026. How entries are approved
McDonald's use of chatbot in its AI drive-through in Chicago was alleged in a lawsuit to have collected and processed voice data without user consent to predict customer information, which violated Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA).
What this means for youIf you order at AI drive-thrus, your voice may be recorded and analyzed, and in Illinois you have legal rights over biometric data. Workers and businesses using voice AI should get clear consent before collecting customer voices. Ask any drive-thru or phone ordering system whether it stores voice recordings or voiceprints, and ask for them to be deleted or turned off if you do not consent.
Sources
- AI Incident Databasehttps://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/360
Data from the AI Incident Database (incidentdatabase.ai), licensed CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/). McGregor, S. (2021) Preventing Repeated Real World AI Failures by Cataloging Incidents: The AI Incident Database. IAAI-21.
Source data license: CC BY-SA 4.0 (database). Report contents keep their own rights; reports.text, submissions, images and videos are excluded from the data license.
rogue:R4
Covered by snapshot 45
da93f03b406f409940d0a6ef47b526607f82ebf457d98f69299b88aceede576a
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