21h ago

Aren't food preferences a threat to your anonymity?

Like, for example, what if someone doesn't like cheese on their sandwich? Or loves pineapple on ther pizza? (its honestly good when combined with ham)

That plus your height and body shape and gender (as they can hear from your voice) is gonna narrow down the possibilities.

5 comments

I'm not sure exactly what you're asking. Any personal information can be used to identify you.
This is pretty high level paranoia, but:
Ordering defaults is a thing ive seen extremely spooky people do. To the poibt it can get sprt of obsessive, pathological. I'm not sure how much it helps
Not every restaurant computerizes every detail of every order. It might go in as 'pizza, large, 2 topping' rather than 'large pizza with pineapple and ham'. Especially if you pay cash, which is more a flag in some areas than others.
There's levels of analysis. All this connection takes work. Going after people you need this level of invasive snooping to find weirds people out.
It either looks like a random abduction, which irks your community and bystanders abd fires up resistance, or they have to admit how creepy they're being-which does the same.
It's really not worth it when there's, unfortunately, so fucking much low hanging fruit.
Plus, not every agency is packing that level if creep, so they would have to share and coordinate, which they don't always love to do.
Any data point can be used to de-anonymize you, but only with other data points, and with non-pii data only when cross referenced with large volumes of other data.
This is why surveillance capitalism is so draconian and dangerous. You only need DOB and postcode to accurately ID like 70% of the entire human population. But your PII is irrelevant in the grand scheme of things. The important data is the data that can be used to target and manipulate you. Your name and DOB are unimportant. Your gender and age group are what's inferred from that data, and what's important in conducting an affinity analysis.
If you order something ultra specific and it's associated with your identity, that's only useful the next time you order that ultra specific thing AND either instance is associated with your identity.
At the end of the day your food order is extremely low value, so don't sweat the small stuff or you'll go insane.
Depends on what you do with that kind of information. For example a CCTV camera can't "see" your food preferences and use it to find out it's you. So it's useless with that. An online store can connect your preferences and make assumptions about you. For example Amazon does that. A restaurant could identify you if you have very specific custom orders and return there. I bet ordering a burger with extra cheese and without pickles won't do it, though. But I've been a pizza delivery driver for a short while and some people had very specific preferences and those reocurring orders were very recognizable.
- a CCTV camera can't "see" your food preferences
  I think cameras can be trained to detect things, especially now with better hardware.
  However, this probably won't be done for 99% people. At least to me, it sounds extremely niche and to be used for spying and stuff against suspects.