At least they’re telling you. There’s also a lot of hidden surveillance in stores - they’ve done it with Bluetooth and cameras for some time. Things like monitoring how long you look at products and evaluating your reactions to displays.
That’s why I always introduce a good bit of entropy to my shopping patterns:
-Enter and go straight to produce
-Spend 20 minutes examining eggplants
-Walk up and down 5 aisles pausing exactly the square of the aisle number in seconds.
-Grab a box of tampons
-Grab what I need as quickly as possible
-Return tampons
-Checkout and leaveSomewhere a marketing team is spending hours trying to figure out how to improve the conversion rates for tampons and eggplants for customers in my demo.
You can just make up some e-mail as, without internet, you couldn’t verify it. Also one of the rare cases where VPN directly improve your privacy.
Walmart, the biggest grocery retailer in the entire United States, uses face tracking in the majority of their stores in several sections, and we’re concerned about their Wi-Fi?
The Wi-Fi seems like such a minor problem compared to them collecting massive amounts of data off of something you aren’t consenting to explicitly.
Like you walk into their stores and they can know: How often you visit, what items you buy, what payment method you use most often, what items you looked at and what aisles you visit, who you bring with you, what your kids look like, what disabilities you may have, size of your household, and whatever else they want. There’s basically no respect for any privacy in their stores.
The US is a privacy nightmare in competition with China. Most of the US doesn’t have any option over their privacy. You just don’t get it here.
Never trust an open network. Even if the company providing isn’t doing anything shady, the easy at which MITM (man in the middle) attacked, can be performed means that many insecure (and some secure) networks can be spoofed with a small amount of know-how.
Always make sure your connecting to a safe, secure wifi network, in a place where you expect that network to exist at.
If your phone connects in a place you wouldn’t expect it to connect, double check what it’s connecting to, and if necessary, disable your wifi.
I created an account while in the store with an email of fuckyou@thisisstupid.com and a basic password and surprisingly didn’t have to verify the email. Then turned on a VPN to my house.
I plan on just creating a new account every time I go in just to fill up their database with nonsense.
Cool, is samwaltoncaneatabagofdicks@inhell.com still available?
It is not. You need to add a number at the end.
Don’t forget to spoof your MAC address so they cant see who is making the fake accounts ;D
That’s done automatically on mobile devices
GIGO (Garbage in, garbage out) is the correct way to deal with the surveillance system.
This makes me feel a lot better about ChatGPT garbage corrupting Google search results.
You do realize that they are actually tracking the device itself by the hardware MAC address and other device fingerprints.
The email is just a bonus to let them legally spam you. Anti-spam laws have an exemption. If there’s a prior business relationship like shopping in their stores, they can put you on their spam list unless you opt out.
Bogus email only helps for spam but doesn’t do anything about tracking.
EDIT: For Android when there’s a Captive Portal like the screen shot. devices will use Persistent randomization which while not the hardware MAC will remain the same for the same network where they can track your visits.
Pretty much all modern phones randomize the MAC address everytime they connect to a network unless the user explicitly says not to do that.
More like “we were doing this before, but now we have to tell you we are doing it”.
At nearly any gas station in NRW, Germany it’s this way as well and I absolutely hate it.
Why are all you mother fuckers shopping at Walmart. They are a welfare corporation offloading their costs to tax payers because despite making tons of money they pay shit and skirt employee benefits laws by keeping worker hours low and give new employees info on how to get financial aid such as food stamps.
This is the most privileged thing you could say.
“Hey, why isn’t everyone eating sustainably sourced GMO-free, organic, locally-grown food all the time?”
Spoiler alert: it costs more
Yeah, this is the thing. Does literally anyone want to go to Walmart? No. Is it the place I can afford? Increasingly, still no. Not sure I can even afford to walk past whatever the good version of a Whole Foods is today, though.
Dollar tree is looking expensive these days
At least dollar tree is significantly easier to shoplift from.
Because all of the other retailers do the same shit only with higher prices. Here in Canada they don’t pay their employees any less than the competition, yet their prices are 30-40% cheaper on average.
That extra 40% doesn’t result in better working conditions for the employees, it goes directly to the shareholders and bonuses for the C-suite.
I respect the hell out of Walmart because they actually keep their price increases tied to inflation and aren’t out there trying to sell a loaf of poverty white bread for $5 or a pack of 4 chicken breasts for $37.
I got some insight from a friend who works at a major supplier for these retail stores in Canada. He said how they manage prices is that when they anticipate a rise in cost they’ll jack the price all the way to a future projected target instead of following the current inflationary rate so that they won’t need to constantly quote their customers different prices. They don’t care because they know it will get passed downstream.
You do realize they were almost certainly doing this before, right?
More of shock value of them announcing it and requiring an email now.
Damn now I have to put in my real email! noooooo I don’t know how to avoid this only real emails work?
In the EU they already had a complaint, because it violates GDPR, but in any case I would never use a public WiFi without a VPN, and even less in places with these conditions, there is also free WiFi in some Rstaurants (even in most McDonalds), public Libraries and others. Fuck surveillance advertising
I have seen it on Europe… maybe there was some way to circumvent it hidden away, not sure. But you could type a random email and that’s it, like they don’t send anything to confirm the email or anything once you submit you have access to internet.
Better to send a disposable mail, where yo can receive the log data before it expired.
eg
- https://maildrop.cc
- https://altmails.com
- https://www.disposablemail.com
- https://www.lazyinbox.com/#/
- https://www.guerrillamail.com
etc
anonbox from ccc
They seem to explain pretty well how your data will be used, why would this violate GDPR?
I might be wrong but i think it is because they don’t give you the option to opt out and use the wifi.
Should they? I would simply not connect to their Wi-Fi and move on, it’s not like they are obligated to provide you internet.
Agreed. My iPhone connects to my home VPN via Wireguard as soon as I leave my home WiFi. Has the added benefit of pihole ad filtering everywhere.
Have you experienced any downsides to using pi hole? Does anything stop working?
In the 6 years I’ve ran mine, I’ve not had any issues and I run a blocklist with over 1 million domains on it.
If I was to run into something that’s blocked that I do want loaded, I can just open the pihole interface and either whitelist the blocked domain or disable blocking for a short time, each with just a couple clicks.
I used to before but my family was extremely bothered that they couldn’t click on ad links. If I remember correctly, it’s pretty easy to set up if you want to just try it.
Obviously the first ad links in google don’t work any more, which drives the wife crazy ;-) Also nowadays more and more websites complain about me using an adblocker.
But technically, not really any problems at all.
Not sure about this Walmart case but most you can write any email like random letters a@gmail.com or not even the Gmail part as long as it’s a valid looking mail and then works like you don’t even have to confirm the email or anything.
my goto is go.fuckyourself@leavemealone.net
Expecting privacy on someone else’s network is absurd.
This is messed up.
