How many different scenarios can you put together for a company putting cameras on shelves in a store?

What's to guess about, here?

Probably billed as anti theft. Likely some form of surge pricing

Probably also a way to track items on the shelves for inventory and ordering. Potentially a way to make sure employees and straightened up the isles/products at the end of the day.

Probably not for surge pricing, they already do all the tracking with Bluetooth for the most part since everyone always has their phone and no longer turns off Bluetooth to save battery.

Yeah but Bluetooth cant tell walmart black shoppers are coming to raise the prices

Also facial recognition, eye tracking, body language analysis - creating the glass shopper, selling the data for peanuts while violating any decency. Legislation is so far behind the current reality that it isn't even funny anymore.

The last federally-passed privacy law concerned video store workers not sharing what VHS tapes you rent. Because it was the 80's...

I'm sure that camera could accidentally be damaged or rendered non-functional.

Looks like a used gum disposal unit to me

I suddenly feel the need to grab my largest tipped sharpie and a mask and walk around Walmart for the first time in years

Mine has had these, but only on locked cabinets, for years.

I don't know if they review 'em tho. Got sick and fucking tired of needing an employee to open the cabinent with the dog treats (most of the time, nobody even comes no matter how long I wait or how many time I press the button for service) so I got my own universal barrel key that opens their cabinets and just take what I need. Sometimes, I even pay for it.

They could do it like Minority Report where it scans you as you grab the item and automatically withdraw the money from your bank account. Tho it's not gonna be reliable, so they're just gonna be stealing your money simply walking by the shelf sometimes.

Please don't doubt that their Bluetooth database links your Mac address to a wide variety of socioeconomic data gathered from thousands of third-party providers. They don't need the cameras to know who's black or rich or a 4 year old on an old Wi-Fi only iPhone riding in a shopping cart. The cameras certainly help, but they're not required for surveillance pricing.

Yeah, that's unfortunately the case, there is no such thing as privacy anymore

Walmart secures two AI pricing patents, raising dynamic pricing concerns

My God that camera is way too easy to "accidentally" tamper with, lol. At the very least, my kids greese covered finger tips while I stroll by.

Tell me more about how one procures a universal barrel key.

Sometimes I pick up a shirt and then decide I don't want it, so I just leave it on any old shelf. I'm not very neat about it, and it might hang over the edge a bit. Oops.

yes, my friend would also like to have this information

pro-tip: use paint pen.

sharpie comes of with alcohol.

paint comes off with scraping and scratching cheap plastic camera lenses.

It looks kind of like a screwdriver. Ask The Lockpicking Lawyer.

I drop heavy hammers into shelves all the time.

I might put on my goin out overalls and check these things out. Ain't my fault I'm a true american with pockets full of wet clay. Takes a pressure washer to get that kind out mud out from under my fingernails.

https://covertinstruments.com/products/covert-tubular-lock-pick

AliExpress or Amazon.

I have a feeling there have been cameras for a while. They just want you to see them

You could just find an associate. From my experience they will help right away

I know someone directly involved with this work/these changes and Walmart absolutely shares this stuff with law enforcement basically freely

I mean, that Walmart already is going to have had cameras all over the ceiling for a long time.

I'm a little annoyed by a local sandwich shop having their ordering kiosk --- which had a camera added --- recognize me and start recommending things based on my prior purchases there.

Now when I order at a kiosk, if I see something that looks like a camera, I put my hand over it.

That's a lock pick, not a key.

Also, Walmart doesn't use physical keys anymore. It's some sort of wireless thing like NFC.

Let those among us who haven’t accidentally packed our pockets with wet clay cast the first clod

Thank fuck that killed Bork’s Supreme Court nomination, fucker was talking about political exceptions to the first amendment.

Dude... Are you really oblivious to the difference? These are for facial recognition, eye tracking and surveillance pricing through RFID price tags.

They literally look like this:

They still gotta find the ONE employee who has the friggin keys.

You go to your favorite search engine and enter "universal barrel key."

That's just a key, presumably a copy of the specific key that your local walmart uses; there's nothing 'universal' about it.

A 'universal' key, IE a key that can be used to open multiple different locks. So yes, a lock pick. What were you expecting?

Not all walmarts are the same, many haven't 'upgraded' to digital locks. Still an interesting tool for the arsenal.

These are some of the cheapest locks you can get and all just use a single tooth to turn the latch.

Each of the little pins you see in the ring of that lock are equivalent to the pins in a typical pin-tumbler lock you'd find on a front door. The corresponding round cutouts in the edge of the key barrel set how far each one is pushed down when you insert the key.

Yes, there's just one little tooth that rotates the lock, but only after each of those pins are pushed down to the correct depth. These are almost always really cheap locks, so you've only got to be kind of close tbh, but you do still have to be close.

You've just got a copy of walmarts keys. (Or a near enough approximation) nothing 'universal' about it. I don't think you explicitly tried to get 'walmarts keys', but got lucky enough with whatever random key you bought that it happens to work.

There's no such thing as a literal 'universal key'. There's commonly used keys (like what a large international retailer might buy and use in bulk....), and there's lock picking tools.

Thoroughly illegal in the EU. Luckily Walmart doesn't operate there.

No such thing as a literal universal key

Ever hear of skeleton keys?

Yes, they're only relevant to purely warded locks which are largely nolonger used in the modern world (exceptions always exist, the world isnt black/white).

In the world of pin-tumbler or tubular locks - what we've been talking about - the closest equivalent would be a comb pick/key; which is a bypass tool (or lock pick) that only effects poorly designed locks with pin stacks shorter than the chambers they're in, when they're fully compressed. I don't think I've ever seen one of these for a tubular lock, but they may exist.

It wasn't luck. They tried and failed, on account of how many of their normal practices are illegal in the EU.

Do we have a "boringdystopia" instance on Lemmy yet?

The only part of that not really possible with ceiling cameras is eye tracking, you don't need eye-level cameras for the other two.

This is why they're losing to Amazon.

A 'universal' key, IE a key that can be used to open multiple different locks. So yes, a lock pick. What were you expecting?

Something like a TSA key that fits the lock in addition to the owner’s key.

A lock pick requires an amount of skill to use and is definitely not a key.

Find the peanut butter aisle. Then make all the aisles peanut butter aisles.

Not yet, at least. It seems that they operate almost everywhere else though