A restaurant with three Michelin stars is now trying to up its customer service game by Googling its customers before they arrive. According to a report from Grub Street, an Eleven Madison Park maitre d' performs Internet recon on every guest in the interest of customizing their experiences.
The maitre d' in question, Justin Roller, says he tries to ascertain things like whether a couple is coming to the restaurant for an anniversary, and if so, which anniversary that is. If it's a birthday, for instance, he wants to wish them "Happy Birthday" when they arrive. He'll scan for photos of the guests in chef's whites or posed with wine glasses, which suggest they might be chefs or sommeliers themselves.
It goes deeper: if a particular guest appears to hail from Montana, Roller will try to pair up the table with a server who is from Montana. "Same goes for guests who own jazz clubs, who can be paired with a sommelier that happens to be into jazz," writes Grub Street.
Obviously, the restaurant is just trying to be better in tune with the people sitting around eating its food and drinking its wine. But it seems like a reasonable assumption to believe people posting their birthday dates online aren't doing so in the hopes that someone they've never met before will know, as if by telepathy, to wish them the best on their special day.
The case speaks to what seems to be the root cause of privacy transgressions—most people aren't too hesitant to give up their personal information, but when it's used for stuff they aren't expecting, it feels like a violation. Customer service enterprises seem only too excited to "know" the "answers" to what a customer "wants" before they are told, but this feels like something that needs a little more consideration of what is comfortable and what is creepy.
We often write about privacy oversteps that have real-world consequences, like marketers creating complete profiles of would-be customers that end up controlling, for instance, what products they see or predatory loans they get. But a restaurant Googling its customers doesn't need to have consequences or even involve obvious big data correlations to feel a little wrong.
The pairing of servers with interests is another matter entirely—one that's more subtle, more insidious. Per the article, Roller secondarily tries to figure out whether customers will be receptive to him knowing this Google-able stuff or if they would rather to personally, for example, let him know it's their birthday. Speaking personally, this would fail. Roller could absolutely scrounge up plenty of information on me, and being an editor of a technology publication, one might think I'd love the novelty of this new application of the Internet. But on the contrary, I would be more likely to spear him into the ground and demand to know who told him it was my birthday. What else do you know?
I can't be the only person who feels this way, but are there others who would be delighted for their maitre d' to light up when they walked into dinner and start talking to them about their personal lives?
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