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Comment by usr1106 | Hacker News Reader

That they have nationwide systems does not surprise me.

But that it's a global system does surprise me. Their main market should be the US, but EU data protection is legally mostly incompatible. I am pretty sure they have major violations.

For FAANGs that's not news and they have their cases with the commission regularly. But for pretty old brick and mortar restaurant business I am suprised.

Edit: Of course the central recipes are globally standard. But otherwise I'd expect the logistics more regional. Especially for Australia mentioned in the article.

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I think one of the value propositions / moats / benefit of scale (nowadays) for a mega corp like McDonald's is that the cost of e.g the kiosk software is spread over so tremendously many restaurants.

Even if they do follow local regulations and have mostly "isolated deployments" of things touching customer data, they might still have things like a centralised DNS server or update server for kiosk/POS software etc.

I would be pretty surprised if anno 2024 an organisation like McDonald's had regional independent SWE/Ops teams building essentially the same thing but for their region.

Megacorp and megacorp. Here they are small franchises, not owned by McDonald's.

Of course using basically the same kiosk software makes sense despite being different localisations and different business owners. Having single points of failure globally not so much. I wonder how business owners take functioning sea cables for granted. We have wars in several places on the planet.

A significant number of McDonalds locations in the US are owned by the McDonalds corporation, not franchisees. And McDonalds wields a heavy hand in "encouraging" franchisees to participate in whatever program they're currently running or implementing. This goes from food introductions, to hardware, to back of the office programs.

Of course that's a core of franchising: Limiting the choice of business owners. They have to source your stuff even if choices more suitable for them might exist.

Why is data protection an issue & what would be a violation? If I walk into one of their establishments & order a burger, the store has zero idea who I am. I just pay, get an order ID & stand there and wait. I don't have to login. There's no PII.

Did you pay cash?

What's that got to do with anything? Card details aren't stored.

Is there no trace of you sending money from your card to McDonalds ? How do they audit for fraud ?

It's stored by your bank but your credit card or account id is never transferred to the retailer by the payment processors instead what happens is that McDonalds get an unique transaction ID that only your card provider knows was generated by your card.

So how do they know it was me who sent the money and not some McDonalds money launderer ?

McDonald's don't your bank does know you authorized an transaction using pin/card/app.

The payment terminal is essentially not actually talking directly to the POS except to tell it that transaction id "xyz"(which only your bank/"card issuer" know is you) was approved, everything else is encrypted between terminal and payment processor and not supposed to be visible to the retailer.

Yours arent, but other people's are when they agree.

Many retail chains I've gone to have the capability to look up your entire purchase history via a credit card, or to refund a purchase to the card that was used.

I don't know if they store the card details directly or if they store a hash, but they certainly have a way to tie your credit card to the video of your face leaving the store and (most likely) a video of your license plate as you drive away.

Sell that to a data broker (as they certainly do in the US) and someone could potentially purchase a history of what you bought anywhere and when.

I've had that experience too. I assume they use your card details to find your internal customer identifier or something and then discard the card details.

Don't they have to maintain that mapping to keep it available?

You don't have to, but you may: ordering via app, collecting loyalty points as well as PII of the staff.

There appeared to be different apps for different countries last I looked in the App Store

What does that tell about the backend system? - Nothing.

Also last time I went to auch a place they asked me for a loyalty thingy even when not ordering by app.

They're aggressively herding people into the behavior of ordering through an app, to the point (people have told me) of charging higher prices if you walk in and pay.

I keep expecting them to remove the 20% discount, but it's available every time.

I don't know how common it is nationwide, but around here, McDonald's and most Chipotles won't take orders at the register. McDonalds will direct you to the kiosk and at Chipotle, if you don't have a phone or tablet to order online, then you're SOL.

Been like that ever since COVID lockdown.

Kiosks I don't mind, you can still order anonymously. I just won't use an app or web site I have to maintain an account on.

This reminds me of the danger of centralizing without safeguards. Like the time Google was able to fat-finger a network change globally. Similar to writing testable code, config changes should be able to be rolled out incrementally, especially if it's not easily revertable. Otherwise don't over-centralize--you have to be this tall to ride this ride.

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