No, you don’t risk a police raid on your home if you steal a mug with the McDo logo on it. In a few days, Internet users – and certain media – broadcast what seems to be a new urban legend: McDonald’s could geolocate you if you steal dishes.
Originally a new law, effective January 1, 2023, requiring fast food restaurants to use reusable plates instead of single-use containers. Quickly, customers were tempted to leave the restaurant with a souvenir under their coats, albeit in limited proportions.
rfid tokens
On Twitter, several Internet users have denounced the presence of an electronic chip under certain utensils. A restaurant has also been installed a poster warning, threatening customers with being geolocated. Since the beginning of the week, netizens have been talking about their fear be geolocated if they were to steal a cup or a box of chips.
As McDonald’s France confirms to Tech&Co, this is not the case. The reusable accessories are well equipped with chips, but by no means a GPS beacon, which would otherwise require a battery and an internet connection to work. These chips are simply RFID chips: tags that contain information that can be transmitted electronically when scanned.
This system has been used for several decades, widely adopted in the field of logistics. RFID chips work like a QR code or barcode, but have the advantage of being able to be scanned much faster, without having to point the reader in a specific direction. They are also cousins of NFC chips, for example embedded in access cards or payment cards.
In the case of McDonald’s, these RFID chips thus make it possible to count the number of plates or glasses during each service, and to evaluate stocks in real time thanks to adapted readers. Readers who, therefore, remain confined to the confines of the restaurant.
Source: BFM TV
