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
LOL, “your communication cannot go through our service that we can monitor, so somebody else might be spying on you, black is white, war is peace, freedom is slavery”
Start giving their store one star reviews and mention this
Please just don’t use public WiFi and if you do, assume that your privacy and security are at risk.
Or use a vpn if you really must. I’ve noticed that most Walmarts have really bad cellular connectivity and this is probably the reason why
I noticed that also. I would never connect to Walmart’s wifi unless it was some kind of communication emergency.
So I just don’t use my phone in Walmart and that’s fine. Human beings don’t require a data feed to survive.
Human beings don’t require a data feed to survive.
The hell I don’t. I am NOT putting up with reality for that long, ESPECIALLY in a Walmart.
I’m not sure Walmart counts as reality.
Sounds like a personal problem. I’d recommend learning to focus on reality in the moment, and be present enough to appreciate the nice things that exist around us. Smartphones and the internet are fun but using them as a crutch to feed all your dopamine is a dead-end road.
This is bad advice inside a Walmart
They have bad cell signal because it’s a giant steel box, big box stores are basically big shitty Faraday cages.
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.
Saaaaaaaame though
I don’t understand why you would need wifi in a supermarket. What are you doing while shopping that mobile data can’t handle?
Large warehouse type buildings make getting a signal difficult ESPECIALLY in a walmart. I prefer using the app to find items I wouldn’t otherwise know where to look.
Yeah, I didn’t consider those absurdly large US malls, my bad.
Mall?
TIL a single building like Walmart is a mall.
I use it to pull up a recipe that I’m cooking, If I need to double check a detail. Usually, I have everything on a physical list for practicality.
The issue is large warehouses, like Walmart or Costco or whatever often have bad cell reception, so you might need wifi to reach the internet.
I primarily use it to look up locations of grocery items.
When I’m looking for a niche item, it’s so much faster to find it in the app than to wonder the store figuring out where it is
Compare pricing?
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.
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.
You read my mind.
I use the websocket tunnel connection mode in Windscribe for those networks that block VPNs.
If you use tcp
Wouldn’t UDP on port 443 still be weird though? I can’t remember whether QUIC and modern HTTP servers serve UDP on that port.
I use a VPN just fine inside a Walmart. It’s annoying you need a Walmart account now to use it.
Did I hear evil twin in your plans
Murrica lmao
Offering open wifi for the public is a terrifying thought.
Just set up a cheap squid proxy or an http proxy. They often still work
A wire guard peer would probably be better
Their ToS requirements don’t appear to require traffic sniffing, so a tunnel won’t save you. Wi-Fi is a digital signal after all
Tunnel is def a good idea though
Wireguard tunnels encrypt traffic, and you can add a pre shared key for additional security, no?
Looks to me like you just needed to get through the captive portal and could have turned it back on immediately after.
The irony of using Apple products, thinking “Private” means “private”.
Do you think the advertising company’s phone is more private?
Google doesn’t make money when you buy a Samsung Galaxy. Google tracks everything you do on your Galaxy. They then take this data and sell targeted advertisement at you. Google makes money when they sell you to advertisers.
Apple makes money when you buy an iPhone.
Apple appears to be double dipping. I don’t use apple products beyond a MacBook. Why for example the laptop has a unique advertiser id (which looks like it can’t even be disabled in newer os versions)?
All OS have advertising ID. Windows does, macOS does (TIL from you), Android and iOS do. Linux doesn’t for obvious reasons.
A lot of the things stored in iCloud are end to end encrypted. That includes all of your messages and attachments in iMessage and all of your bookmarks in Safari. Apple simply can’t use those things to advertise at you.
As far as other targeted advertising, Apple doesn’t track you across apps. In other words, searching for something in the App Store won’t result in different ads in Apple News. And doing anything in any third party app won’t affect any targeted ads in any Apple app. (https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/control-how-apple-delivers-advertising-to-you-iphf60a6a256/ios)
You will still see targeted ads on iOS in third party apps, because Google still tracks you in an app if it uses AdMob.
At least on the advertising company’s phone, I have the freedom to install a different, more privacy respecting OS like GrapheneOS.
That is true of Android as well.
And remember that while iOS is built by a tech company first and foremost, Android is built by an advertisement company first and foremost.
I have tried both, and only Android gives me the feeling that someone is constantly looking over my shoulder.
I know Apple does also, but I don’t get the same feeling.
You pay the premium price to feel better about the same thing.
Quite possible
You can literally sniff the fucking traffic and see that’s not true. You understand there are laws of physics at play here and the devices can’t sneak data/etc past them, right? Default android devices send significantly more data back to home base than a defaultly configured iOS device.
I recently acquired a used iPad and its my first real iOS experience in a decade, and I have to say I have similar feelings from using it.
Many privacy controls are set to their tightest settings by default, many things require the app to ask the user before intruding then give you clear indication if and when they are intruding, and most controls that I might want to change aren’t buried 4 layers deep in the settings.
However, I can’t install uBlock Origin on Firefox (yet?) and there’s quite a few minor customizations I’d really like to change but can’t. And honestly Android’s openness to sideloading sometimes lets me do things like load an old paid game that hasn’t been updated in several years and sometimes does or doesn’t work depending on the Android version and specifics of the vendor’s implementation, or snag random stuff off Githubor Itch if I really want to.
only Android gives me the feeling that someone is constantly looking over my shoulder.
Aurora Store instead of Play Store, Firefox with UbO and Adguard DNS. I feel Android does look over my shoulder (why do I need to use ADB to disable uninstallable apps or install pre Android 6 apps?!) but not in the context of privacy. I don’t know how having GMS enabled w/o being signed in affects being tracked.
Bruh, can we not do the whole teasing people who prefer one brand’s proprietary OS & interface over another?
Bruh, there’s no brand whoring from me here. We’re all products. Simmer. Bruh.
How do ya compare incentives of Apple/Cloudflare & the big box store in terms of data privacy?
I’m surprised by how many people here buy into Apple’s marketing. I thought people on Lemmy would be more aware.
Yeah… It’s genuinely sad. 🤷🏽♂️😅
