Funny thing is, the regional grocer in my area has cameras up all over the entrances and parking lot. In my situation, there is less surveillance at Walmart than the “other guy”.
Surge pricing, here we come!
Find the peanut butter aisle. Then make all the aisles peanut butter aisles.
This is why they’re losing to Amazon.
No it’s because their website sucks
Do we have a “boringdystopia” instance on Lemmy yet?
Thoroughly illegal in the EU. Luckily Walmart doesn’t operate there.
It wasn’t luck. They tried and failed, on account of how many of their normal practices are illegal in the EU.
Not yet, at least. It seems that they operate almost everywhere else though
They actually tried it in the EU but failed hard.
I mean, that Walmart already is going to have had cameras all over the ceiling for a long time.
I’m a little annoyed by a local sandwich shop having their ordering kiosk — which had a camera added — recognize me and start recommending things based on my prior purchases there.
Now when I order at a kiosk, if I see something that looks like a camera, I put my hand over it.
Dude… Are you really oblivious to the difference? These are for facial recognition, eye tracking and surveillance pricing through RFID price tags.
The only part of that not really possible with ceiling cameras is eye tracking, you don’t need eye-level cameras for the other two.
I might put on my goin out overalls and check these things out. Ain’t my fault I’m a true american with pockets full of wet clay. Takes a pressure washer to get that kind out mud out from under my fingernails.
Let those among us who haven’t accidentally packed our pockets with wet clay cast the first clod
I know someone directly involved with this work/these changes and Walmart absolutely shares this stuff with law enforcement basically freely
Mine has had these, but only on locked cabinets, for years.
I don’t know if they review 'em tho. Got sick and fucking tired of needing an employee to open the cabinent with the dog treats (most of the time, nobody even comes no matter how long I wait or how many time I press the button for service) so I got my own universal barrel key that opens their cabinets and just take what I need. Sometimes, I even pay for it.
Tell me more about how one procures a universal barrel key.
You go to your favorite search engine and enter “universal barrel key.”
That’s a lock pick, not a key.
Also, Walmart doesn’t use physical keys anymore. It’s some sort of wireless thing like NFC.
A ‘universal’ key, IE a key that can be used to open multiple different locks. So yes, a lock pick. What were you expecting?
Not all walmarts are the same, many haven’t ‘upgraded’ to digital locks. Still an interesting tool for the arsenal.
A ‘universal’ key, IE a key that can be used to open multiple different locks. So yes, a lock pick. What were you expecting?
Something like a TSA key that fits the lock in addition to the owner’s key.
A lock pick requires an amount of skill to use and is definitely not a key.
yes, my friend would also like to have this information
AliExpress or Amazon.
It looks kind of like a screwdriver. Ask The Lockpicking Lawyer.
They literally look like this:
That’s just a key, presumably a copy of the specific key that your local walmart uses; there’s nothing ‘universal’ about it.
These are some of the cheapest locks you can get and all just use a single tooth to turn the latch.
Each of the little pins you see in the ring of that lock are equivalent to the pins in a typical pin-tumbler lock you’d find on a front door. The corresponding round cutouts in the edge of the key barrel set how far each one is pushed down when you insert the key.
Yes, there’s just one little tooth that rotates the lock, but only after each of those pins are pushed down to the correct depth. These are almost always really cheap locks, so you’ve only got to be kind of close tbh, but you do still have to be close.
You’ve just got a copy of walmarts keys. (Or a near enough approximation) nothing ‘universal’ about it. I don’t think you explicitly tried to get ‘walmarts keys’, but got lucky enough with whatever random key you bought that it happens to work.
There’s no such thing as a literal ‘universal key’. There’s commonly used keys (like what a large international retailer might buy and use in bulk…), and there’s lock picking tools.
No such thing as a literal universal key
Ever hear of skeleton keys?
You could just find an associate. From my experience they will help right away
They still gotta find the ONE employee who has the friggin keys.
Looks like a used gum disposal unit to me
Sometimes I pick up a shirt and then decide I don’t want it, so I just leave it on any old shelf. I’m not very neat about it, and it might hang over the edge a bit. Oops.
I suddenly feel the need to grab my largest tipped sharpie and a mask and walk around Walmart for the first time in years
pro-tip: use paint pen.
sharpie comes of with alcohol.
paint comes off with scraping and scratching cheap plastic camera lenses.
My God that camera is way too easy to “accidentally” tamper with, lol. At the very least, my kids greese covered finger tips while I stroll by.
I have a feeling there have been cameras for a while. They just want you to see them
Are we supposed to understand what’s going on here? I sure don’t.
How many different scenarios can you put together for a company putting cameras on shelves in a store?
What’s to guess about, here?
Probably billed as anti theft. Likely some form of surge pricing
Also facial recognition, eye tracking, body language analysis - creating the glass shopper, selling the data for peanuts while violating any decency. Legislation is so far behind the current reality that it isn’t even funny anymore.
The last federally-passed privacy law concerned video store workers not sharing what VHS tapes you rent. Because it was the 80’s…
Thank fuck that killed Bork’s Supreme Court nomination, fucker was talking about political exceptions to the first amendment.
They could do it like Minority Report where it scans you as you grab the item and automatically withdraw the money from your bank account. Tho it’s not gonna be reliable, so they’re just gonna be stealing your money simply walking by the shelf sometimes.
Probably also a way to track items on the shelves for inventory and ordering. Potentially a way to make sure employees and straightened up the isles/products at the end of the day.
Probably not for surge pricing, they already do all the tracking with Bluetooth for the most part since everyone always has their phone and no longer turns off Bluetooth to save battery.
Yeah but Bluetooth cant tell walmart black shoppers are coming to raise the prices
Please don’t doubt that their Bluetooth database links your Mac address to a wide variety of socioeconomic data gathered from thousands of third-party providers. They don’t need the cameras to know who’s black or rich or a 4 year old on an old Wi-Fi only iPhone riding in a shopping cart. The cameras certainly help, but they’re not required for surveillance pricing.
Yeah, that’s unfortunately the case, there is no such thing as privacy anymore
