McDonald's Loyalty App

You know how I feel about apps, particularly "loyalty" apps. Here's a concrete example.

WIRED’s Reece Rogers requested a copy of his data from the McDonald’s loyalty program and received an extensive, personalized report that algorithmically predicted he’d never stop being a customer.

Here's just a taste (pardon the pun) of the data that McDonald's was keeping:

📹 Watch the full video story on WIRED:

"McDonald's Built a 515-Page Dossier on Me. It Says I'll Never Stop Eating There."

Watch Video on WIRED ↗

Delete those apps.

Cloud Single Points of Failure

Probably one of my most frequent blog topics is "cloud". I'm sure that you've all read and incorporated my suggestions in your solutions. You're welcome.

Recently, a twist arose that I hadn't considered.

You've certainly taken advantage of your cloud providers geographic separation. But did you ask the really tacky questions?

In July, Google Cloud had an "incident" that took down customer workloads that were spread across multiple geographic "zones."

It turns out that some of Google Cloud services are tied to a single datacenter.

But YOU certainly inquired about that when you contracted to place your workload across different zones and regions to ensure resilience. And a requirement that all of the cloud's services you require were redundant in your contract with service level commitments.

Didn't you?

Now you know.

The details are here (archive.org) and here (archive.org).

When You Roll Things Out, Stress Test Them

One of my favorite podcasts is Security Weekly News hosted by Doug White.

In a recent episode, Doug got off on testing. Here's a link to that section of the podcast.

So when you roll things out, stress test them. Not just "Oh, yeah, it works. I'm connected."

You know? And the other part of this is, for you, is how reliant are you on things like Wi-Fi?

I mean, which components of your enterprise will no longer function if they just aren't connected?

Say, something goes down. Can you even open a file? Can you even run Word or check your email? Are all your files on the cloud somewhere? Can you no longer communicate with the world  and you're standing in an office window in Manhattan trying to use semaphore flags to contact the Port Authority?

I mean, I don't know but what's your plan? And you know, what are you going to do? Just tell all your customers to come back in a couple of months when we figure it out and hope it works then? Beats me.

Think about it...