Creepy "good ol' Canadian company Tim Hortons": Double-double tracking: How Tim Hortons knows where you sleep, work and vacation

[shockedcanadian]

Just another creepy Canadian to throw on the pile of my dismay. Who needs the Chinese when a nice, sweet, trusted, Canadian donut company can spy for it?

I called this one as soon as I heard about the app (really, who the hell wants to use an app to order a coffee or donut?), told my wife not to download such an app or use it. Some of us try to at least understand risk so we can avoid it. I already know how creepy our covert police are, I also know how willing donut shops are in working with said police in "the community". This was an easy pass.

Double-double tracking: How Tim Hortons knows where you sleep, work and vacation

I never would have consciously volunteered my home address, work location and vacation plans to Tim Hortons, but the company found out anyway.

I haven’t been singled out for special treatment. For more than a year, the coffee chain has been tracking the movements of customers in exacting detail through its mobile ordering app.

I’ve spent months sifting through my own data, and it’s staggering how much the company knows about me.

From my home to my office to a Blue Jays game at Rogers Centre, even all the way to Morocco, where I travelled on vacation last June, the company’s app silently logged my coordinates and relayed them back to its corporate servers.

Data privacy concerns have become a mainstream issue in recent years, even more so these days with various governments and companies proposing to track the COVID-19 virus using technology to keep tabs on where people go and who they might have interacted with.

 

[Marion Morrison]

Just another creepy Canadian to throw on the pile of my dismay. Who needs the Chinese when a nice, sweet, trusted, Canadian donut company can spy for it?

I called this one as soon as I heard about the app (really, who the hell wants to use an app to order a coffee or donut?), told my wife not to download such an app or use it. Some of us try to at least understand risk so we can avoid it. I already know how creepy our covert police are, I also know how willing donut shops are in working with said police in "the community". This was an easy pass.

Double-double tracking: How Tim Hortons knows where you sleep, work and vacation

I never would have consciously volunteered my home address, work location and vacation plans to Tim Hortons, but the company found out anyway.

I haven’t been singled out for special treatment. For more than a year, the coffee chain has been tracking the movements of customers in exacting detail through its mobile ordering app.

I’ve spent months sifting through my own data, and it’s staggering how much the company knows about me.

From my home to my office to a Blue Jays game at Rogers Centre, even all the way to Morocco, where I travelled on vacation last June, the company’s app silently logged my coordinates and relayed them back to its corporate servers.

Data privacy concerns have become a mainstream issue in recent years, even more so these days with various governments and companies proposing to track the COVID-19 virus using technology to keep tabs on where people go and who they might have interacted with.

I always pay with cash.