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
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.
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.