[robinanil]

Disclosure: I am the Director of Engineering at Tock. We power the reservation system at Eleven Madison Park which Will and Daniel own.

The notion of a user's past history with rich data has been something high end restaurants have been trying to manage either via spreadsheets or via custom crm implementations. What we have done is to make that easier through product design and machine intelligence to bring it to more down market restaurants.

It unlocks really great experiences for guests, avoids the need to talk about your allergies every time you walk into a restaurant and makes sure it is accurate and upto date.

[chinathrow]

To get that right, if you're a restaurant using your services:

a) you spy on your guests

b) you cross reference with other data sets without your guests knowing

c) you do this for improved revenue

I'll make sure I never eat at restaurants using Tock. Good look seting up proper opt-in once you serve EU guests after May 2018.

[robinanil]

a) unequivocally no! I am not sure what I mentioned caused you to believe that.

b)Yes, enriching the data is a key part of our offering but we are very transparent in our data practices and take this job very seriously.

https://www.exploretock.com/terms https://www.exploretock.com/privacy

c) Improved revenue comes with increased visit and spend, that happens only if the customers get a great experience.

The practice of taking notes is something that every restaurant is doing. What we make sure is that they capture only the necessary information. Every customer controls their public information through their profile page and can choose to remove it if needed.

[keiferski]

Lots of businesses are looking for ways to do lots of unethical or undesirable things - that doesn’t somehow absolve you of responsibility for enabling them.

[robinanil]

Typing up notes is far from unethical or undesirable. Our responsibility is to make sure the product focuses on the right things like dietary restrictions or visit history, to reward for loyalty and provide a great experience