[HN Gopher] McDonald's AI drive-thru bot accused of breaking bio...
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McDonald's AI drive-thru bot accused of breaking biometrics privacy
law
Author : donohoe
Score : 44 points
Date : 2021-06-13 17:15 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theregister.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theregister.com)
| ALittleLight wrote:
| Wow! That law is interesting!
|
| -----
|
| 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.
|
| ...
|
| Under the BIPA, people can receive up to $5,000 in damages from
| private entities for each violation committed "intentionally or
| recklessly,"
|
| -------
|
| Unless I'm missing something people in Illinois should get Amazon
| Echoes or Halos which both "voiceprint" users and then sue Amazon
| to collect their 5k reward.
| [deleted]
| kevmo314 wrote:
| Using voice recognition to automate drive-thrus...
|
| Seems like they could've added QR code + online ordering to each
| of their parking spots instead but I guess AI is cool too.
| jsight wrote:
| I've used touchscreen kiosks at Taco Bell and McDonald's and
| Subway. TBH, none of them are great experiences for simple
| orders.
|
| Order ahead is available from the app, but I wouldn't be
| surprised if regular audio is actually faster in most cases.
| joezydeco wrote:
| Audio is much faster. McDs is way behind with mobile order
| and pickup. I've done curbside orders where I sat in the slot
| and watched the entire DT empty out before someone came out
| with my food.
|
| If you want to see a group that has their technical shit
| together, check out Chik-Fil-A.
| LanceH wrote:
| Audio is probably faster per person. However, it is serial in
| nature. I walk up to 4 kiosks and want a combo #3 with a
| coke, and I get to skip the three families, each trying to
| talk their 4 year old into choosing fruit and milk over fries
| and a coke.
|
| Also, order verification is nice with a kiosk (for now). If I
| want something without pickles, I can see that right in front
| of me. It seems like every drive-thru and PoS that has a
| display which can provide order feedback has switched to
| displaying ads to buy some other product. I'm sure it's just
| a matter of time before the kiosks start to have modals which
| have to be cleared to continue with the order: Have you tried
| the hot apple pie? How are you enjoying the kiosk experience?
| Really, the people doing these things can never resist.
| kevmo314 wrote:
| They could offer a phone number to call in to place your
| order so orders could be placed in parallel
| Phylter wrote:
| They already have it so that you can order by phone. A
| touchpad/kiosk type thing would make perfect sense too except
| maybe it required more hardware than they wanted to spend money
| on?
| [deleted]
| shadowgovt wrote:
| People who own cars aren't guaranteed to own smartphones, and
| McDonald's wants their business too.
|
| In addition, the McDonald's drive-thru is iconic, and the
| stickiness of that part of the brand means it won't go away
| soon.
| cbhl wrote:
| McDonalds does offer mobile ordering, but their own-branded
| apps are segmented by country. If my App Store is set to the US
| and I order in Canada (or vice versa) then I have to fall back
| to more traditional ordering methods like going to a
| kiosk/cashier/drive thru.
|
| Honestly this (cross-country ordering and payment) is one of
| the things Uber Eats does really well, but you definitely pay a
| price premium for it over, say, the Starbucks or McDonalds
| apps.
| throwawayboise wrote:
| As I've gotten older I've cut back on my fast-food intake quite a
| bit. Not really for heath reasons either, though it's a nice side
| benefit. It just really isn't very good food, and it seems to
| have gotten worse over the past 20-30 years. Especially for what
| it costs.
|
| However, I will never order from a voice-driven AI system. If
| that is the choice, then I decline. I don't use it in any other
| area of my life, in fact I cannot stand talking to computers
| despite using them professionally as a career. When I call
| someplace and have to speak to a computer I mumble jibberish
| until the system gives up and transfers me to a human. I'm a
| human, I want to speak to other humans, not computers.
| mLuby wrote:
| Sorry to be Butlerian about it, but "conversing" with machine
| simulacra disrespects me, the customer.
|
| Someone should deploy a voice-producing AI to interface with
| companies' voice-processing AIs so I can order from the command
| line or from an app.
| ALittleLight wrote:
| Conversing with the machine simulacra disrespects you, but
| instructing your machine to converse with their simulacra
| doesn't?
| gambiting wrote:
| English isn't my first language so I dread any kind of voice-
| based systems, and automatic recognition is just the worst.
| Calling a help line where you have to say what you're calling
| about to an AI first is just futile. If that's the only way to
| order at McDonald's then I'll just stop eating at McDonald's.
| fpgaminer wrote:
| > The software apparently has an 85 per cent accuracy rate.
|
| That number seems really low to me for a task specific system.
| i.e. it doesn't need to understand every possible thing someone
| could say; just the subset of language used to place orders at
| McDonald's. For reference
| (https://paperswithcode.com/sota/speech-recognition-on-libris...)
| SOTA models are at ~5% WER for general speech.
|
| And besides, who wants to order from an AI that's going to fuck
| up 15% of the time? Compared to a human that error rate is
| perhaps on-par, but a human has an internal confidence
| measurement. We know when we've heard something wrong. Speech
| systems don't really have that (1). So the AI will just blunder
| forward with your order. I'd much rather interact with a system
| that says "Sorry, what was that?" 15% of the time (i.e. the
| current meat based voice recognition that fast food restaurants
| use) versus a system where I constantly have to check the screen
| and tell it "Oh, no, sorry, can you fix the, ummm, uhh, we don't
| want 20 orders of ketchup packets... Oh, god, no we don't want 40
| ketchup packets! No our order isn't done! WAIT!"
|
| (1) Yes, you can guess at confidence by measuring the logits, but
| that doesn't work in practice. It's nowhere near a human's
| capability to self-measure confidence in our predictions.
| sumnuyungi wrote:
| Using your own link, SOTA is 2.6%. WER could be lower for the
| much smaller vocabulary used in a drive-thru.
|
| I'm not sure what you mean by "that doesn't work in practice"
| re: using logits. Word-level confidence is pretty useful with
| GCP Speech-to-Text [1]
|
| [1] https://cloud.google.com/speech-to-text/docs/word-
| confidence....
| version_five wrote:
| > I'm not sure what you mean by "that doesn't work in
| practice" re: using logits.
|
| I suspect they mean they ML models are usually poorly
| calibrated and that the softmax-over-logits probabilities
| generally don't reflect actually error rates, so they're
| tough to use meaningfully for asking people to repeat
| themselves.
|
| Personally, if I have to deal with an automated order system,
| I'd rather some kind of search tree that let's me traverse it
| using three (left, right, back) well separated noises and a
| "dumb" back-end instead of having to pretend a ML system and
| I are having the meeting of the minds that a voice based
| discussion implies.
|
| I understand that such a system would be hard or impossible
| to train lay-people to use, but it would be nice to have a
| "cut the crap" option to let people interface more
| effectively with the order system and not take part in the
| charade of a "discussion"
| jeeeb wrote:
| > SOTA models are at ~5% WER for general speech.
|
| Do SOTA results measure performance in difficult environments
| though?
|
| Presumably dealing with people talking out of their car window
| next to a busy road would be a lot more difficult than dealing
| with a relatively clear audio recording.
|
| EDIT: It looks like the linked results are for an audio book
| dataset. That seems like an optimal environment where you're
| going to get clear enunciation with minimal background noise.
| thrower123 wrote:
| 15% error is wildly less than I normally get ordering at the
| McDonalds drive-through. Not quite half the time I have to give
| my order again at the second window, then again at the third
| window.
| gambiting wrote:
| Here in the UK when you go through the drive through at McDs
| the order appears on the screen next to the microphone, they
| ask you to confirm that's what you ordered. Never had a wrong
| order this way. Seems like a very simple solution if
| something this is isn't standard everywhere.
| cs2733 wrote:
| Personally, I don't mind having all my data harvested. I'm aware
| this is a hot button issue on HN that keeps getting people
| outraged, again and again, but believe that eventually people
| will start shrugging about how invasive technology can be.
|
| Ultimately things are moving towards the end of privacy and even
| (within 50? 100 years?) the end of ownership. I don't see how a
| civilization that can - easily and with currently available means
| - house, clothe and feed everyone on the planet, can sometimes be
| so lost on petty issues as we do (myself included).
|
| I'm more concerned with the health hazards posed by modern
| technology and industrial processes - but that's me and the
| reality I subscribe to.
| apocalypstyx wrote:
| > the end of ownership
|
| I think it more likely the acceleration of ownership. Near-
| infinite copyright, patented math, the trend has been more
| greatly in one direction than the other. Even the nature of
| FOSS/Creative Commons relies on this (even as many suppose it
| to be breaking free of it). (As someone from some documentary I
| can't fully recall put it: we will not be free and the world
| will not be fixed until every square inch of it is owned
| privately.)
|
| In previous western society, it was acceptable to own the
| physical human being. The investment was in ontology. But now
| the investment is moving towards epistemology. People are data.
| Own the data, own people.
| wyxuan wrote:
| Here ye, here ye. It's just the direction things will go
| towards, and I know most other people will feel
| uncomfortable(and so do I) but I think it'll be something that
| could be changed by changing societal expectations.
|
| An analogy could be that 100 years ago the outrage was over
| women wearing revealing clothing and how it would affect the
| purity of society, but now attitudes have changed and now we
| barely blink an eye.
| tacitusarc wrote:
| Someone will always own it, it just won't be you.
| est31 wrote:
| Someone will always have privacy, it just won't be you.
| leppr wrote:
| Things are not moving towards the generalized end of privacy
| and ownership. That may be the case for a specific subset of
| the population (the 99 percenters), but overall things are
| simply moving towards a centralization in information
| availability and asset ownership.
|
| The "elites" (sorry for the boogeyman word Overton window'd out
| of acceptable use, but it's accurate) own more and more, know
| more and more about you and your peers, and you still don't
| know anything about them, or have any democratic control over
| them.
|
| For someone presumably working in the information industry,
| calling privacy a petty issue is an interesting opinion, when
| data is the underlying lifeblood of most of our businesses.
| gryfft wrote:
| Every time I see this take, I imagine Lenny saying "Goodbye,
| dental plan!"
|
| We'll all be toothless sooner or later. Why not abolish dental
| hygiene and medicine altogether? Think of the savings.
| belter wrote:
| Please allow me to express my choc that you can even formulate
| this statement.
|
| Can you not see the dangers that, as you are profiled, and data
| gets correlated across providers, you will be subject to levels
| of discrimination you can not foresee ?
|
| Some simple examples:
|
| - You live at a certain location and looking to move ? A
| certain provider will decide not to show you jobs if you happen
| to live at a certain neighborhood ( Already happening...)
|
| - You live at a neighborhood somehow less respectable, or
| respectable but where inhabitants are considered more prone to
| have car accidents ? -> Your car insurance will be more
| expensive
|
| - You are deemed to cruise trough McDonalds once in a while ?
| -> Your health insurance will be more expensive...
|
| - You happen to be correlated to a certain group a people due
| to data location data ? Even if you do not know these persons ?
| ->You are likely to be inquired by the police if you know
| anything or have seen anything ...
|
| -> You know when you have your meals or you consume less meals
| ? - You will be classified as probably part of a certain
| religious group
|
| - You spend a certain time in a certain hospital department ?
| -> Your current health status will be shared with your current
| employer, dooming your chances of promotion...
|
| -You spend a certain amount time at at certain bars,
| entertainment venues or restaurants within your town ? -> Your
| sexual preferences will be inferred...
|
| Privacy guarantees,h liberty and peace, plus societal
| opportunities are the defining fights of these times. To see a
| statement like this, frankly inspires both sadness and concern.
| cheschire wrote:
| Privacy is a 1 dimensional spectrum which runs from living in
| isolation on one end to living under thought police on the
| other end.
|
| You cannot move towards the end of privacy without losing
| control over your thoughts.
|
| In the world you're describing, everything everyone says will
| be recorded. Neural networking will be used to process tone and
| read body language to determine your thoughts before you even
| consciously recognize them. As a child you will be trained to
| recognize and halt bad thinking subconsciously.
|
| Consider the episode of The Office where Jim is offered the
| position of branch manager, and he turns it down because he
| thinks everything's working fine without a branch manager so
| why have one?
|
| Never pass up the chance to take an active role in sustaining a
| good thing. If you feel the balance of privacy is good today,
| take an active role to ensure it slips no further, or else
| someone with more ambition than you will gladly push that point
| along the line a little further.
| [deleted]
| throwawayboise wrote:
| > Ultimately things are moving towards the end of privacy and
| even (within 50? 100 years?) the end of ownership
|
| Yeah we've actually already tried that a few times. It's never
| ended well.
| amelius wrote:
| Isn't this what Google has been doing? Collecting our data (voice
| and whatnot) and using it to build automated systems?
| axus wrote:
| The McDonalds app is pretty good for special orders and large
| orders, which would otherwise be irritating for everyone
| involved. My local restaurant has always correctly removed the
| ketchup, onions, and pickle from the $1 cheeseburger.
|
| Saving my "Favorites" and the deals giving $3 off makes up for
| the mildly clunky app performance. Being able to take everyone's
| order before leaving the house is also nice.
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