i’m pretty lucky to have unlimited data included with my phone plan. i would 100% have been hacked by now. public wifi is scary.
That’s great, unless the store you’re in is a giant concrete bunker.
Mobile data barely works in my neighbourhood supermarket; even text-based communication is frequently dicey, but you want to send someone a photo of something as a “should I buy this”? Fuhgeddaboudit.Then buy it, or come back later.
Why open yourself up to all the nasty of public WiFi for that?
Either you’re buying something cheap, so just do it. Or it’s something expensive, and in that case a simple quick message isn’t really enough. Go out to the parking lot and talk about it, or come back later.
You can just make up some e-mail as, without internet, you couldn’t verify it. Also one of the rare cases where VPN directly improve your privacy.
Try luck with throwaway email + VPN. Although it’s possible they’ll still be able to identity you if you’re the only one using that VPN on your local Walmart. At least they won’t be able to see your traffic.
At nearly any gas station in NRW, Germany it’s this way as well and I absolutely hate it.
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It sounds to me like they are developing some tools to help map things inside the store. So they can give you directions to things you are looking for maybe. Also with this information they could do something similar to those Amazon stores where you just pick things up and walk out and it charges you automatically.
Not saying you all want to share the info with them. It is invasive. But as an engineer I can see so many cool features I could build with this information.
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Never trust an open network. Even if the company providing isn’t doing anything shady, the easy at which MITM (man in the middle) attacked, can be performed means that many insecure (and some secure) networks can be spoofed with a small amount of know-how.
Always make sure your connecting to a safe, secure wifi network, in a place where you expect that network to exist at.
If your phone connects in a place you wouldn’t expect it to connect, double check what it’s connecting to, and if necessary, disable your wifi.
How would they do man in the middle attacks? Don’t you need to trust their certificate first?
That mechanism only happens after you connect to it, you have to connect to the wifi in order to download the certificate to connect. And it doesn’t apply to all open WI-FI. A someone can still spoof the wifi. The fun part is when they set up their own false “I agree to the usage” pop up page that just steals your data - standardised systems like this are easily spoofed, especially when it comes to open and insecure wifi. They could even send you a bogus certificate that routes all the traffic through their gateway, allowing them to spy on the secure connections.
You do realize they were almost certainly doing this before, right?
More of shock value of them announcing it and requiring an email now.
Damn now I have to put in my real email! noooooo I don’t know how to avoid this only real emails work?
I’ve never had this happen before so I didn’t know. I just thought it was interesting how they’re requiring this now though.
It’s a good thing they don’t have high resolution cameras tracking everything you look at, or they might know what you were thinking about buying
It’s a good thing I don’t have any socials for them to trace me back to. And since I work there, I’m always looking at shit that will prolly throw them off.
Expecting privacy on someone else’s network is absurd.
This is messed up.
Not only were they already collecting that information, they likely are collecting information about your position in the store from wifi positioning.
Yeah, you can pretty much assume that any random Wi-Fi asking for that information is already doing that. My local mall has one that will accept any old email but it certainly looks like this one wants you to create an actual Walmart account.
Brilliant service and add a VON om top it will make it no sweat.
