This is after forcing login to a store account:
At least they don’t hide in their ToS that:
“l agree to let Walmart monitor my use of Walmart WiFi, including to:
- Determine my presence in Walmart stores
- Associate information about me with my Walmart account
- Improve products and services
- Gather market insights about my in-store purchases and activities”
But that’s not enough, they need to monitor your internet activity further too.
For further reading, some greatest hits (the section headers on Wiki’s Criticism of Walmart):
- Local communities
- Allegations of predatory pricing and supplier issues
- Labor relations
- Poorly run and understaffed stores
- No AEDs in stores (automated external defibrillators)
- Imports and globalization
- Product selection
- Taxes
- Animal welfare
- Midtown Walmart
- Opioids settlement
Oh this gives me good reason to find a Walmart. I would love to see how it handles VPNs and it would be a fun game to set up a travel router that can obfuscate the VPN tunnel if needed.
Did I hear evil twin in your plans
Using OpenVPN or Wireguard should work because they typically use port 443, which you can’t block without killing the internet connection altogether.
Wireguard uses UDP which you definitely can block without breaking HTTPS (just QUIC aka HTTP/3). And its default is port 51820, I believe.
I use the websocket tunnel connection mode in Windscribe for those networks that block VPNs.
I use a VPN just fine inside a Walmart. It’s annoying you need a Walmart account now to use it.