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
Instead of offering WiFi why don’t they just set up LTE/5G in store? I once complained to my carrier about terrible reception and they sent me a magic box that takes cellular data, puts it in a VPN tunnel back to the carrier and goes on from there.
I thought these things were pretty normal, or am I missing something?
The problem is that you don’t get LTE/5G reception in the store from your phone, so why would a box that does the same thing solve the problem?
The box routes the traffic over the Internet typically via Ethernet. The magic box opens a VPN tunnel to the carrier where the traffic is handled the same way it would be if you were using “real” LTE/5G.
That would be good for the customer. I think the whole point of it is to monitor customer traffic, so even if it’s a better solution, I doubt they would do it lol.