Your online reservations are telling restaurants all about you
TL;DR
OpenTable uses AI to tag diners with details like wine preferences and spending habits based on past orders, which restaurants see during reservations. This was recently highlighted by a host on TikTok, raising privacy concerns.
Are you a red wine drinker? A high spender? Or perhaps you're a slow eater, the sort who takes up a restaurant's table for longer than they'd like. You might not even know - but OpenTable does.
Those are just a few of the notes that the reservation platform has started serving up to some restaurant staff when you make a booking, all based on the orders you've made and money you've spent at other restaurants in the past.
Kat Menter, a host at a Michelin-starred restaurant who posts about food online as Eating Out Austin, first spotted the new "AI-assisted" tags at work a few weeks ago and shared a look at the system on TikTok. Most flag th …