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
Nah. Their network their rules. Quit your bitching or use 5g.
It was a worthwhile sacrifice, but I’m definitely gonna name & shame! Wouldn’t touch WiFi if it weren’t a dead zone.
Also gave me a chance to complain about some of their other business practices. (Certainly wouldn’t have shopped there if I hadn’t been asked to this one time.)
I’ve never seen this message before so they seem an outlier even in the greedy corporate world. Enough complaints and every once in a while a business changes their practices. Why not whine a little? 🙂
Every public WiFi is like this. iCloud relay doesn’t work on any airport or airplane WiFi. I need to always turn it off and other ‘hide IP’ settings. I have a Target with a dead zone and I’m sure T&C are the same. I just use it when I need it and don’t auto-connect. Walmart needs precise location to pick up from the app. Sam’s club app needs precise location for checkout form the app. Mcd app needs my precise location to give me deals. I wouldn’t say this is asshole design. Our regulation let them design it this way. I turn off my NextDNS and iCloud relay when I’m having issues and then turn back on. Nothing else you can do about it, apart from not using the WiFi or app, unfortunately.
The privacy community and yourself have become the equivalent of windows UAC. It’s tiresome and no sane person with an understanding of technology would ever have the expectation of privacy on a public WiFi network. There are legal and compliance obligations.
Dude, I understand technolgy enough to know that when I use the HTTPS protocol, I have privacy on my packets.
You keep trying to associate the expectation of privacy with a lack of technical knowledge, but I have technical knowledge and you’re wrong.
Why because you know what https means?
It’s the legal and compliance part the downvotes don’t understand.
As a business, I would never operate an open-to-the-public network. The liability is too great.
And what y’all legal and compliance people don’t understand is that we make the rules. Life is not just about complying with rules. It’s about making them too.
How is allowing people to use a VPN a legal/compliance issue? If anything the traffic is exiting to the internet elsewhere and because it’s encrypted you can’t see what’s happening, essentially offloading responsibility to someone else while still providing access.
complaining about a lack of privacy on a public wifi node is like complaining that people are perverts for looking at your genitals when you run down the street naked.
More like “calling your neighbor a pervert when they offer you a place to shower when yours is out and you find out they’re taking videos” but okay
No, cause you have an expectation of privacy in a shower. You don’t have an expectation of privacy in public.
No reasonable person has an expectation of privacy on a public wifi, hell most people wont even connect to a public wifi because they dont want to take the unnecessary risk. Especially with a public wifi provided by such stellar companies like Walmart.
Which is why the entire argument is as stupid as getting angry at people looking at your junk when you’re running around naked in public.
I have an expectation of privacy in my motor home when showering, even if I’m using water that’s coming from some private entity’s pipes.
Just the same way that on my own phone I have an expectation of privacy, even if I’m using connectivity coming from some private entity’s pipes.
It’s more like calling your neighbor a pervert when they force you to undress in front of them prior to showering, or force you to go out naked in public. There’s no legitimate reason to block vpn tools aside from bathwidth or tracking issues, the former can be handled by QoS and the latter isn’t an issue unless you’re using your “free Wi-Fi” to harvest data.
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More like calling them perverts when they tell you that you can’t come into their store with your clothes on.
Not entirely sure if this is possible but I’m increasingly suspicious that they started jamming outside networks within their warehouse. Of course it makes sense that mobile data doesn’t really work inside a giant steel warehouse, so perhaps it’s just confirmation bias, but I can’t seem to recall not having any mobile data signal at all until my last walmart visit.
I used to keep to myself and look up the location of the item I was looking for online. If they want me to bother a floor person for it though, doing that is highly preferable to giving walmart my email to sell along with any information they can extrapolate from my usage of their network.
Jamming is incredibly illegal so I doubt that. They probably just have a bad roof for reception.
Also remember hanlon’s razor.
Multiple big-box stores in my area have poor cell reception in-house. I blame the giant metal roof overhead, which is probably acting like some kind of Faraday cage or RF filter.
Yes, Walmart is committing felonies 🙄
Excuse me for not knowing the precise legal landscape involved in covertly blocking the use of outside networks inside of a private warehouse department store
For future reference, jamming radio equipment is illegal essentially everywhere on earth because it’s banned by the ITU rules, which every country on earth has adopted with the sole exception of Palau. Palau isn’t an exception here though, because they’ve also also adopted those rules in a roundabout “not-actually-joining the ITU” way.
Lol why is this an opinion? If people want to vpn out of my network I don’t give a fuuuuuuuuck. Now if you’re raw doggin’ that traffic or sucking down the bandwidth don’t bitch when I filter or throttle, for sure, but surely you can at least empathize with people wanting to use privacy tools, ya tool.
Our society has so much choice in it. So many options, such as not using the internet at walmart, not going to walmart, etc.
Ah, the falicy of choice. A very privileged position to have. I hope you continue to have the privilege to have such choice, but I also hope you develop the empathy to see the disparity in removing it from others.
Would you say the same thing if they intercepted HTTPS connections? Or blocked popular
DNS(edit: DNS over HTTPS/TLS) resolvers and required you to use the one advertised in DHCP?I think if you’re going to provide WiFi, just do it and stop spying on me.
The reason they want this is probably so they can tie your Walmart account to your position inside the store. And see which other sites you visit to find a better price, etc.
Yes. Their public network. I have no expectations of any privacy on a public network. This is privacy 101.
You’re conflating the individual practice of having a pessimistic threat model with a corporation’s entitlement to behave badly.
Of course I assume the worst from Walmart or any other public network — I just think they should have some class and provide a public good to their customers without creepy privacy invasion. Somehow they manage to provide free water in fountains without requiring me to scan my driver’s license.
If they published a white paper explaining the Differential Privacy properties of their customer analysis tech, I might revise my opinion.
They aren’t invading the privacy here. They are preventing a malicious actor from running an attack via VPN and ssh tunneling in addition to IP address, device, etc. At worst they are associating IP with browsing at competing stores. Preventing the VPN was likely required by a lawyer and auditor and a risky attack vector for a billion dollar company.
If Walmart was breaking https and inserting man in the middle games it would be in their policy. Other commentators went off into fantasy land edge cases where traffic is being decrypted. And it still doesn’t change my expectation of privacy on a public hotspot.
Are you okay with this for every hop on all your routes? I mean I’m sure very few of them are publicly-owned servers.
Yes they are, they’re forcing you to disable Private Relay.
This makes no sense. I could walk outside the store and do any of those things on my 5G connection. Private Relay does not enable these attacks and blocking it doesn’t prevent them.
Wut? They are the ones assigning IP addresses. Not sure what you mean.
At worst, they’re using your IP address to join your walmart.com session cookie with complete time series data on your store position, data from store cameras, etc. to build a creepy profile without consent.
It’s not a problem for Starbucks. As long as the public facing network is separate from the internal store network, e.g. with a VLAN, what is the concern?
Regardless, it would be shitty behavior.
If they were cracking crypto schemes and were decrypting your traffic, it’s entirely possible this violates a “hacking” law in the US.
It was a hypothetical to explore the extent of your “their house, their rules” viewpoint.
Then why do their ToS say they use this data for advertising purposes? If they really need to be able to track you to prevent malicious actors, they can do so without using the data for advertising.
Dude. End to end encryption. That is network privacy 101.
Exactly. “Hey, we’re gonna let you use our network. But if you do anything illegal or shady on our network, we’d be held liable. So we’re gonna track what you do on our network to make sure if you do try something, we can remove you from the network and have proof.”
I mean, yeah, they’re also gonna collect advertising data, but do you really expect to have an expectation of privacy when using someone else’s network? Just like they can film you in the building, they can monitor your network traffic on their network.
If this surprises you, maybe you should do some more research on how a network actually works. And get a VPN. And maybe don’t connect to random public networks(you don’t even want to know what OTHER PEOPLE can do to you on those networks, nevermind the company).
Also, you pay for your cellphone service, right? Are you paying for the wifi in the store? Nooooooo. They’re giving it to you for free. Almost like they’re offering you something in return for that data monitoring. Like they’re offering you a service with a built in method to recoup costs… A service you voluntarily use and in doing so, agree to their terms.
Or you, you know, don’t use it.
That is kind of the concept behind the internet. A bunch of networks passing packets along, using the same protocol, not asking questions about their content.
Fifteen years ago we had a whole battle and everyone other than the evils at the top were against deep packet inspection. This new generation is a bunch of bootlickers.
Yeah, wtf is going on here? You’re allowed to say corporations shouldn’t do things, even if they’re technically legal.
Are these people such fierce libertarians that they support Eli Lilly’s right to price gouge diabetics for their insulin?
Do you miss the part where you’re not paying to use that network and it’s offered as a free service? I’m old too dumbass. I remember before wifi even existed. Do you also go to Walmart and expect to be able to charge your batteries for free off their power? Or use their phones for free?
You’re confusing free as in beer and free as in speech. No one is forcing you to use their FREE service. Use your own cellular network jackass. The network that you DO pay to use.
What’s next, going to someones house and demanding their Wi-Fi password because “the Internet is free man!”
I mean, with that logic you might as well argue that this whole community is pointless because no one is forced to use any of the products or services that use an asshole design, free or not.
The purpose of this community, as I see it, is to point out anti-consumer practices used in existing products and services. While it could be intended to get the attention of someone who can change it, realistically it’s an asshole design because they likely knew it wouldn’t be well-liked from the start.
The purpose of this community as I see it is:
Walmart isn’t obligated to offer wifi, but sometimes you can have a shit deal even when the price is 0.
Check this post out Buddah
Note the significant spittin’ of fax between the top and bottom rows of pixels
There were maybe one or two comments I think posted early on that made me think “wait, did I post this on CorporateJerk or HailSamWalton by mistake” 😀
Wal-Mart sux, public WiFi is not ideal, yeah duh now lemme poop on a particularly poor example of Fortune 50 behavior pls 😉
(Hmm by which I mean Fortune 1)
The issue being it seems they block VPNs based on the screenshot. At least that’s what I am thinking this iCloud thing is
Which is still their right, with it being their network. The cost of using their bandwidth is letting them watch what you do with it. Don’t like it? Don’t use it.
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Yes? Indirectly its baked into the cost of service.
While I get the sentiment, I can’t help but picture the complaining customer “I PAY your wages” from that statement.
Because it is. The customer isn’t paying for the hardware, electricity, or bandwidth. Dude above is a nonce.
Woosh…
What service? It’s baked into the cost of collecting data. That’s literally the exact reason they give it to you FOR FREE.
You really need to learn the difference between free speech and free beer. You’re asking for free beer.
Correction, cost of goods is what I meant. I’m not going to Walmart just for the WiFi.
My comment was also meant to be sarcastic. Free WiFi while I spend my earnings, which I’d expect prices to reflect the cost of this service, in a giant metal box seems fair to me. Trading privacy as an extra cost I’m not okay with, so I won’t use it.
Thanks :)
Not only is it baked into the cost of goods and offered as one of their services to attract customers (like “free” pick up), it reduces labor costs by showing customers which shelves to peruse to find their comic books and their chocolate milk. Their captive portal also serves as an ad for digital payment & their scan + mobile checkout offerings (coincidentally both enabled by Internet service like their Wi-Fi), which may increase retention and reduce labor costs respectively.
THEY DONT EVEN LET ME USE DATA THO! Like they force me to use their wifi while inside the store and I HATE IT. I cant even call my mom cus it just murders any kind of single I had going in there.