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Instacart shoppers besieged by bots that snatch lucrative orders

seattletimes.com

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Re: Instacart shoppers besieged by bots that snatch lucrative orders

#21

Post by rayhendricks »

Wow saw that video, maybe someone got into their API?

What if someone from a non-USA location started selling access to the best batches in prime USA locations e.g. SF/LA/SEA/NYC/DC then we could start trading and packaging up those batches and trading on them in crypto exchanges, maybe even make a new coin?

Also having someone put in a SSN is not any kind of verification if you’re trying to subcontract out to people not in the country legally/documented. The ssn algorithm is known and it is easy to generate, it just don’t get fixed because politics.

Maybe we have finally found a decent use for eth?

Re: Instacart shoppers besieged by bots that snatch lucrative orders

#22

Post by function_seven »

tptacek wrote: post #17
function_seven wrote: post #7

I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that this is only possible on Android, right? The video linked by ultimoo shows an Android, and my perception is that iOS sandboxing is much tighter. How can Instacart combat this? They can't require iOS among their shoppers. Is it going to be an arms race of heuristics and anti-cheat code like it is for games that want to prevent aim-bots? Or they could start running their own…

Smaller teams than Instacart have put up effective fights against cheating. It's an arms race, but so what? The goal is to make cheating uneconomical, not impossible.

There's always some cost to having to implement countermeasures.

In games, I've seen seen poorly-implemented anti-cheat software kick or ban legitimate players from their games.

A sibling comment mentioned captchas. That would suck for legitimate Instacart shoppers. Imagine frantically looking for each photo that has a stop sign in it, knowing that the orders you're trying to claim could be snatched up by someone who's a faster captcha solver.

Somehow there's always a cost when bots start to wage war against other bots. Sure, they can figure out how to minimize it for the human, while making it uneconomical for the bots to exist.

I guess I'm just curious how they're going to do that. Because I can already see the blog post now: "Instacart Banned Me for No Reason"

Re: Instacart shoppers besieged by bots that snatch lucrative orders

#23

Post by gruez »

rayhendricks wrote: post #21

Wow saw that video, maybe someone got into their API? What if someone from a non-USA location started selling access to the best batches in prime USA locations e.g. SF/LA/SEA/NYC/DC then we could start trading and packaging up those batches and trading on them in crypto exchanges, maybe even make a new coin? Also having someone put in a SSN is not any kind of verification if you’re trying to subcontract out to people…

>e.g. SF/LA/SEA/NYC/DC then we could start trading and packaging up those batches and trading on them in crypto exchanges, maybe even make a new coin?

In that case you might as well make claiming orders be based on a dutch auction system.

Re: Instacart shoppers besieged by bots that snatch lucrative orders

#24

Post by AniseAbyss »

ALittleLight wrote: post #10
Johnny555 wrote: post #5

Maybe the best strategy is to tip low when placing the order, then increase the tip after delivery to reward the guy who needed the money enough to take your order with a low tip.

Then you'd also incentivize workers to take orders with low tips and be disappointed when they really get a low tip. Seems more fair to me to require the company pay their employees a fair wage and benefits rather than redefine those that work for them as contractors to dodge those obligations.

[flagged]

Re: Instacart shoppers besieged by bots that snatch lucrative orders

#25

Post by mkatx »

Reminds me of working at amazon doing prime deliveries and using an Android app where you can create flow charts to automate grabbing hours. The difference is amazon at the time didn't care. We even reported what we were doing as a bug, and recommended a queue system instead, yet we only got automated responses not mentioning the issue at all.

This automation included an annoying screen refresh, where you hit back and then reenter to see if the button is lit up to get hours. I remember feeling terrible sitting in the warehouse waiting for an order and seeing others clicking back and forth as fast as they can the entire time, all while my phone was silently, with the screen disabled, 'scanning' for hours.

I think they consider the warehouse drivers like what I used to do temporary, till they get their drone fleets up.

Regarding instacart, and these systems in general, a queue system is just the most fair option. Your take home pay shouldn't be reduced to how well you can click a touch screen or whether you happen to be aware of app automation. It doesn't even seem to benefit the platform itself, just degrade the experience of the driver's.

Re: Instacart shoppers besieged by bots that snatch lucrative orders

#26

Post by benatkin »

.app is great for giving official-sounding domain names to scammers. Way to go, Google.

Eventually more .app domains will be squatted, the price will go up, and companies will buy domains proactively (like instashopper.app - instashopper is obvious shorthand for Instacart Shopper, the official term) but not before a lot of unethical enterprises take advantage of it.

Re: Instacart shoppers besieged by bots that snatch lucrative orders

#27

Post by CydeWeys »

mkatx wrote: post #25

Reminds me of working at amazon doing prime deliveries and using an Android app where you can create flow charts to automate grabbing hours. The difference is amazon at the time didn't care. We even reported what we were doing as a bug, and recommended a queue system instead, yet we only got automated responses not mentioning the issue at all. This automation included an annoying screen refresh, where you hit back an…

Fyi, the word is "queue".

Re: Instacart shoppers besieged by bots that snatch lucrative orders

#28

Post by DennisP »

Johnny555 wrote: post #5

Maybe the best strategy is to tip low when placing the order, then increase the tip after delivery to reward the guy who needed the money enough to take your order with a low tip.

For a while, that's what you had to do to keep Instacart from taking a big chunk of the tip. They finally stopped doing that, after public pressure.

https://www.eater.com/2019/2/6/18214354/instacart-delivery-w...

Re: Instacart shoppers besieged by bots that snatch lucrative orders

#29

Post by chefandy »

mnm1 wrote: post #13
gruez wrote: post #8

Is there a reason why instacart even allows you to pick orders? It seems like this exploit can be stopped just by only letting shoppers look at the first few items of the queue, and limiting the amount of skips.

That could be construed as Instacart assigning orders to their shoppers which would likely make them employees eligible for benefits, something they want to avoid at all costs. This may already be the case in CA regardless of what they do, but they definitely want to avoid paying any benefits for their workers in any state where this is not yet currently the case.

Definitely this. They don't care who gets the orders as long as they're gotten, and assigning the work to people rather than letting people pick from a pool makes them look more like an employer/dispatcher rather than a broker.

Re: Instacart shoppers besieged by bots that snatch lucrative orders

#30

Post by mkatx »

CydeWeys wrote: post #27
mkatx wrote: post #25

Reminds me of working at amazon doing prime deliveries and using an Android app where you can create flow charts to automate grabbing hours. The difference is amazon at the time didn't care. We even reported what we were doing as a bug, and recommended a queue system instead, yet we only got automated responses not mentioning the issue at all. This automation included an annoying screen refresh, where you hit back an…

Fyi, the word is "queue".

Haha, your right.
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