Taco Bell Gets Sneaky, Tracking Phone User Habits

Taco Bell’s mobile presence was a fairly exciting idea at first, allowing users to place orders and even pay for said orders in advance, making the trip to Taco Bell as easy as stopping at a specific window and asking for the paid-for order.

Things are getting a little interesting now, though, as reports note that Taco Bell is tracking mobile customers in a bid to push its breakfast menu.

The Taco Bell breakfast is a comparatively recent addition, and reactions have varied from joy to astonishment.

The breakfast menu contains 10 new items going for $1 each, and Taco Bell wants potentially interested meal buyers to be more aware of the possibility of a Taco Bell breakfast.

To that end, it’s joined up with Aki, a mobile advertising firm that helps in terms of tracking mobile users. With Aki, Taco Bell can get a handle on what apps are used at what times of day, and if it discovers some clear morning activity, it can drop the word on Taco Bell’s breakfast.

Taco Bell has also been hard at work retooling the Wishbone mobile app that offers mini-polls to users, using side-by-side images like a piece of flat bread or a flatbread quesadilla.

While few really want mobile habits to be tracked—it’s a policy that smacks of the downright insidious—having that information can be valuable to both company and user.

After all, it’s entirely possible that some of Taco Bell’s customers are as yet unfamiliar with the new Taco Bell breakfast lineup, and knowing about this sort thing could be helpful.

Some may already know about it, but forget about it during those crucial breakfast times.

User tracking can seem like a problem—can indeed be a problem in cases—but businesses need information to present the best possible slate of advertising to a user.

There’s just no other way to do it. It would be better if Taco Bell instead worked from information supplied to it by customers, but it has to come from somewhere.

This new move on Taco Bell’s part is reasonable but worrisome, and the kind of thing that may make some users think twice before dealing with Taco Bell’s mobile programs.