AssholeDesign

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This is a community for designs specifically crafted to make the experience worse for the user. This can be due to greed, apathy, laziness or just downright scumbaggery.

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'"Walmartwifi" isn't compatible with iCloud Private Relay' | Store demands privacy sacrifice to use internet in their cavernous dead zone of a building (lemmy.world)

submitted 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 months ago

They aren't invading the privacy here.

Yes they are, they're forcing you to disable Private Relay.

They are preventing a malicious actor from running an attack via VPN and ssh tunneling in addition to IP address, device, etc.

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.

At worst they are associating IP with browsing at competing stores.

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.

Preventing the VPN was likely required by a lawyer and auditor and a risky attack vector for a billion dollar company.

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?

If Walmart was breaking https and inserting man in the middle games it would be in their policy.

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.

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.

It was a hypothetical to explore the extent of your "their house, their rules" viewpoint.