There's an annoying paywall I don't care to ty to get around but the fact that your grocer can correlate you to your drug use is the real worrisome part here.
Walmart runs a pharmacy, and most people use the same payment cards to check out for food and for pharmacy purchases (and also happily offer up loyalty cards and other tracking identifiers).
Walmart is also one of the largest users of facial recognition technology.
Why would it be surprising or worrisome that the people you buy something from know what you bought from them?
The degree to which Walmart enthusiastically links things via payment cards has me considering going back to cash when I shop there. The first time I saw a series of in-store purchases unexpectedly show up in my walmart.com account history, I was not particularly happy.
There’s a difference between them having a record of your purchase and them accessing that record for business analysis reasons. If Walmart operated a medical clinic, would you comfortable with their corporate data scientists accessing your health records?
> one of the largest users of facial recognition technology
> Why would it be surprising or worrisome
...Are you serious? An unstoppable megacorp that continues to horizontally expand across a number of markets using some of the most invasive possible surveillance and tracking methods to correlate tons of tons of personal behavioral data of hundreds of millions of normal citizens, and you can't find the slightest thing worrisome about it?
Walmart is also one of the largest users of facial recognition technology.
Why would it be surprising or worrisome that the people you buy something from know what you bought from them?