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McDonald's app bug let people order for free in France

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Re: McDonald's app bug let people order for free in France

#31
post #17

It's always interesting to me that so many people seem to completely lose all compunction about stealing once technology is involved. If they were ordering from a cashier at McDonald's and the cashier got distracted for a minute and somehow forgot to charge them before finishing the order, most of the people that abuse a bug like this would tell them about the mistake. I've been in similar situations plenty of times,…

> It's really a fascinating piece of psychology to me, that once there's a "system" in place, abusing holes in it feels like a reasonable thing to do, even if the end result is effectively shoplifting.

This is the same anti-empathetic "what can we get away with" dynamic as stores engaging in surveillance-based advertising, deploying menacing robots that bother customers, setting up mobile device tracking and facial recognition cameras, price discriminating with coupons and routine sales, etc. Also when any customer service fleshbot says they "can't" do something because the computer says no.

It's only as technologists that we see the details of technology as ultimately mediating interpersonal actions rather than just taking its presence as a given. We know better than to mess around with holes in apps this way, largely because it's in the category of malicious hacking which generally gets punished pretty hard (burn the witch!), especially if you are one of the first to find such tricks.

But I personally am not going to get too upset over some individuals getting occasional freebies, especially while similar abuse by businesses tends to get normalized and then scaled up.

Re: McDonald's app bug let people order for free in France

#32
post #17

It's always interesting to me that so many people seem to completely lose all compunction about stealing once technology is involved. If they were ordering from a cashier at McDonald's and the cashier got distracted for a minute and somehow forgot to charge them before finishing the order, most of the people that abuse a bug like this would tell them about the mistake. I've been in similar situations plenty of times,…

>When Amazon accidentally sells expensive camera equipment for 99% off on Prime Day

I've always wondered how much of those are actually mistakes, and not just media stunts

Re: McDonald's app bug let people order for free in France

#33

More details: if you ordered a "Golden Menu" with a "McFirst" sandwich on the mobile app or on the self-service machine, almost everything you add would have been for free. The bug was first reported on Twitter and it took about 7 hours for restaurants to refuse to give orders.

Interesting that they had the exact same issue on both platforms. It's also the kind of thing where some people might just guess that the behavior is intentional and take advantage of it.

Re: McDonald's app bug let people order for free in France

#34
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There was another one I saw where you could order a dollar burger, then order another ten burgers without the burger, and because of how the kiosk software calculated the "no burger" modifier, the total came out to $0. This looks like the software was missing some internal sanity checks. For example, it was hammered into us at Caltech that any answers we derive need to be sane. If an energy value turned out to be n…

> Software should have the same sort of checks. It's called "contract programming", the simplest manifestation of which are asserts. A wrong answer is wrong, but the correct response isn't always to fail. Imagine you added this and that caused 0.01% of orders to fail for 10 days while you debug the issue. Perhaps your assert is only stopping a 1 cent deviation from the correct order total - is it better to prevent 0.…

Detected failures should bounce it to the cashier to ring it up. All the McD's I've been in with a kiosk also have a human cashier to help anyone with problems.

> or something else

Easy to account for it.

BTW, the entire reason for the invention of double entry bookkeeping is to detect errors, not throw up hands and say it can't be done.

Re: McDonald's app bug let people order for free in France

#35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you please explain concretely what your definition of stealing is? To most sane people, it is not stealing when a transaction price is set, and that price is paid. If you buy a car and complete the transaction and as you're driving off the lot the dealership says, sorry, that car is 200,000 not 20,000; would that be stealing? Why or why not?

Could it have been obvious the price was 10 times higher than you paid? If yes, then it's stealing. If no, then no.

I see this as a negotiation between man and machine. The machine in this case was bad at negotiating.

Re: McDonald's app bug let people order for free in France

#36
It might be a stunt, but stuff like that happens. Many years ago I used to work for a large European company that ran a booking system for several hundreds of airlines. The system was used as a back-end by more than one famous online booking site. Currency rates were updated automatically. Once, on a new year's eve, at midnight, a glitch slipped into the Canadian dollar conversion rate, setting 1 CAD to 0 EUR. All of a sudden, all Air Canada flights were for free for European customers, at what might be the worst time of the year : "- so, this year's resolution : we take time to travel. - hey look honey, Canada looks cheap. - deal done, book right away, and let's open one more bottle of champagne !" I don't know how many AC flights were booked before someone realized and an on-call guy fixed the conversion rate. However, I know that all those free bookings remained valid, and were offered by my company who payed all of it directly to Air Canada.

Re: McDonald's app bug let people order for free in France

#37
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Software should have the same sort of checks. It's called "contract programming", the simplest manifestation of which are asserts. A wrong answer is wrong, but the correct response isn't always to fail. Imagine you added this and that caused 0.01% of orders to fail for 10 days while you debug the issue. Perhaps your assert is only stopping a 1 cent deviation from the correct order total - is it better to prevent 0.…

Detected failures should bounce it to the cashier to ring it up. All the McD's I've been in with a kiosk also have a human cashier to help anyone with problems. > or something else Easy to account for it. BTW, the entire reason for the invention of double entry bookkeeping is to detect errors, not throw up hands and say it can't be done.

> Detected failures should bounce it to the cashier to ring it up

Assuming a minor deviation from the real order cost that ends up being more expensive than swallowing the difference and continuing with the order, and it also increases the number of abandoned orders at peak times.

Either way you’re paying a dollar to save a cent.

Because you don’t know what the true value should be (else you have no bug) it’s very hard to choose the correct course of action. I’d argue that attempting to detect unexpected deviations and adding friction to fast food orders could backfire massively at McDonalds scale

Re: McDonald's app bug let people order for free in France

#38
post #17

It's always interesting to me that so many people seem to completely lose all compunction about stealing once technology is involved. If they were ordering from a cashier at McDonald's and the cashier got distracted for a minute and somehow forgot to charge them before finishing the order, most of the people that abuse a bug like this would tell them about the mistake. I've been in similar situations plenty of times,…

People love Robin Hood, who was absolutely a thief, but also a folk hero.

To understand why people are generally ok with this, ask yourself: Who benefits, who loses?

In this case, some random person benefits, and the company (hopefully not the franchisee) loses.

Re: McDonald's app bug let people order for free in France

#39
post #17

It's always interesting to me that so many people seem to completely lose all compunction about stealing once technology is involved. If they were ordering from a cashier at McDonald's and the cashier got distracted for a minute and somehow forgot to charge them before finishing the order, most of the people that abuse a bug like this would tell them about the mistake. I've been in similar situations plenty of times,…

It's not like McDonald's exists in good faith. Remember that, to the typical person on the street, McDonald's is a system that exists adversarially, not as part of a holistic and humane society. Edit: I don't eat at McDonald's. Do you, downvoters?

[flagged]

Re: McDonald's app bug let people order for free in France

#40
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Detected failures should bounce it to the cashier to ring it up. All the McD's I've been in with a kiosk also have a human cashier to help anyone with problems. > or something else Easy to account for it. BTW, the entire reason for the invention of double entry bookkeeping is to detect errors, not throw up hands and say it can't be done.

> Detected failures should bounce it to the cashier to ring it up Assuming a minor deviation from the real order cost that ends up being more expensive than swallowing the difference and continuing with the order, and it also increases the number of abandoned orders at peak times. Either way you’re paying a dollar to save a cent. Because you don’t know what the true value should be (else you have no bug) it’s very ha…

Using sanity checks in software is normal practice, especially in software that calculates critical things. It works.

> I’d argue

I'm sure if you put some effort into thinking about how to make it work, you'll be successful.

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