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.
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.
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
I created an account while in the store with an email of [email protected] 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 [email protected] still available?
It is not. You need to add a number at the end.
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.
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.
