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That's because both situation have absolutely nothing in common.

People tell cashiers when they make a mistake not out of a desire to avoid "stealing" (stealing is taking something without permission or right by the way so neither case is actually stealing by the way) but because they empathize with an actual human being making mistakes like they sometimes do and want to be helpful.

Corporations can't at the same time replace people with machines to optimise their bottom line and expect their customers to remain empathetic. Once you put in place automatic system you have to owe them. You can't win on both side.

If Amazon gives huge reductions by mistake, well, too bad for Amazon, the reductions are still there. It has absolutely nothing to do with shoplifting.

When a grocery store has self-service cashier stations, is it acceptable to only scan half of your items?

Your previous analogy has already been questioned, so replying with another analogy without explaining the similarity seems in bad faith.

When there's a "system", everyone's very aware that an error against them will be treated inhumanly and be very time consuming to correct. It's a bit like a prisoner's dilemma where you expect the other side to defect.

Also, Amazon have more wealth than like half the population put together. A few lenses aren't going to put a dent in that. The only case I can think of that did was the "Hoover free flights" fiasco, and that wasn't even an error.

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.

These sorts of "cutesy" arguments don't hold up in a court of law.

http://www.nbcnews.com/id/21534526/ns/technology_and_science...

That wasn't a glitch in negotiating. The system knew that the purchase was cancelled but sent the items anyway. It makes perfect sense that the system can legally ask to get those items back.

It depends on what the cancellation policy is, if the cancellation policy says that the responsibility to return is on the buyer, then absolutely it's stealing.

90% discounts are not unheard of.

can you not think of corner cases to your vague notion of "obviousness"?

In France there is, AFAIK, a law that says that if you buy something when there was a system error setting the price, the company can legally ask you to give the item back.

Usually they don't because of the PR problem it could cause but a system mistake does not mean that the item is suddenly free for grabs.

I do understand people taking advantage of it though, it's a bit like winning a tiny lottery.

Consider it people providing incentives for writing secure software.

Perhaps the world would be a better place if everyone behaved honestly all the time, but that is an unstable state because it takes only a single person to deviate from the norms in such a world to exploit all the systems that weren't designed with bad actors in mind.

The cashier situation is not comparable because it's not exploitable reliably. Unless you have an easily distracted cashier that can be cheated all the time. If that were the case I could see some less scrupulous people starting to do that.

Is this stealing or just taking advantage of a loophole?

When tech companies funnel revenue to Ireland or other places to avoid taxes, is that stealing?

Stealing would imply deceit. McDonalds decided it would be best to use software to engage in these transactions.

>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

I think there is a bias were you learn about digital mistakes effecting many people and human errors that effect only certain transactions. A lot of people will not complain when they get back more than their change.

It's pretty simple at face value. You're interacting with a person instead of a screen, that's basically like a game where you try to "win" by getting the best price for all the stuff you're ordering. Of course you might know it's wrong but you don't see anyone (and can likely assume) no one directly involved will take the fall for it. Compared to a cashier that gives away something for free, they might get yelled at or lose their job. It's empathy, it's human, and it makes a lot of sense.

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?

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.

Something that harms a cashier (a worker) is harmful to a worker, which is for most intents and purposes "human."

"Robots are stealing our Goddamned jobs!" is a popular sentiment around the globe. Who is using these robots to replace jobs that should belong to people? Corporations. Corporations are not people, as much as some sorts seem to believe they are.

Taking advantage of a corporation's mistake hurts billionaires and millionaires (this includes McDonald's franchisees, as the corporation doesn't allow just anyone to become one, costs are high), who aren't really people in the conventional sense of the word.

These corporations, billionaires, millionaires and so forth are the ones who are stealing from the people; taking advantage of their errors for something like this is good. McDonald's spends millions a year on lobbying to harm the common good; $5 or $10 or even $1,000,000 from them will mean nothing to them, but will go a long way for the people taking it.

Taking advantage of McDonald's Corporation errors is morally no different than shoplifting from Wal*Mart, which similarly spends millions lobbying and harming the common good, the only difference is that the former presents no risk to the person doing it.

In an era where "No one should be a billionaire!" is a popular political viewpoint, and billionaires have effectively stolen the common person's political agency through lobbying, it seems reasonable that people won't see any harm in taking stuff from them, especially small amounts that they won't miss, like this.

I don't necessarily agree with the sentiment, but it's definitely reasonable and understandable to see why people don't care about taking from people who, from their perspective, didn't earn it in the first place, and won't notice that it's gone.

> 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.