These systems only exist to take as much money from individual shoppers as possible. They're throwing all kinds of lies at the wall to see which ones consumers will fall for.
> ESLs are ecological: they can be updated and they last for years, it saves paper and ink! This is utter bullshit. Prices and products don't change that often
Prices didn't used to change that often, but now they can be changed several times a day (or even several times a minute) using automated systems. Cell phone tracking and cameras can allow a store to get information about you and your income and they can use that data to charge you higher prices for everything, or to strategically increase the prices of the items you buy most often while monitoring and tracking changes to your buying habits in order to take as much money from you as possible. That's the entire point. It's not about ecological savings, it's about economical gains.
> ESLs provide better price accuracy, what you see is what you'll pay
Facial recognition at the shelf and at the register can keep prices consistent for you as an individual even while those prices change wildly over short amounts of time. I doubt they'll let you modify the price displayed at the shelf and still give you that same price when you check out though. It'd be risky. If you were caught it might be treated like swapping bar codes or like terrorism depending on where you are.
> Some ESLs are NFC enabled. You can tap your phone to get more infos on a product
Making you sure you've got your cell phone lets them pull data off of it and fingerprint the device. The goal is to use that info to gather real time feedback about you from data brokers, like how much money you have.
By all means, mess with these systems for laughs, but it's going to take actual laws with teeth and oversight to keep them from being abused.
good sir, what are you smoking, i wish for some to share.
If, as you rave, prices were adjusted per person as they walk up, how would the register ring up the correct adjusted prices, might i ask? and secondly, reading an NFC label exposes no unique IDs from the reader.
> how would the register ring up the correct adjusted prices
Facial ID, "loyalty" cards, and device fingerprinting.
Reading an NFC doesn't expose anything, but placing your phone next to a bluetooth beacon could, NFC+store app could, and so would your face.
Stores already uniquely identify customers with membership cards/accounts. They're also doing their damndest to link those more closely - see how Kroger is shifting from the Kroger card to digital coupons that require you to sign into an account.
They could simply offer the worst prices if you don't use your card (Kroger basically already does this), so you're effectively required to identify yourself.
the ufcw is pushing this narrative because they're continually afraid that they "threaten the jobs of grocery workers".
i guess the ufcw is stuck in an attitude that you can't train someone who was told "stick this piece of paper here on this shelf" to "stick this tag on this location on the shelf and scan a barcode".
gotta keep some stupidly low level clerk work available out there apparently.
I also think that was a little too far fetched for the real world currently, but .. I'm not 100% certain. I have no doubt at all that there are sociopathic CEOs out there who would think this is an entirely reasonable proposition in order to increase profits.
But I also think that technically if they are tracking you in the store and adjusting the labels when you near products, it would not be difficult to show you that price that at the till, where they are still tracking you.
The real problem would be ensuring that the other customers were shown appropriate prices. Perhaps that would not be a problem I don't know. If three people are near a product, then just show the max price you think one of them is willing to pay, the others can suck it up? Perhaps the others weren't going to buy that in any case? You know one of them wants to buy that particular item, they always do. And, many people don't really look at the price labels in any case. If the store tags a person who will reject items as being too expensive at the till, then just charge them less than the price that was shown which they didn't look at when they picked it up. Once you move into the "profit above all" mindset of tracking customers and cynically adjusting the prices, it doesn't seem to me that anything would be out of bounds.
In my experience most people don't care about what the news tells them anywhere near as much as what's going on in their personal lives.
If they've got money and they aren't worried about paying their bills or the price of food or the price of gas and they can afford a nice place to live and can afford to send their kids to college and can take at least one big vacation a year and they're spending their time going out with their friends they aren't losing much sleep over news stories that mention war in Somalia, or some politician's latest scandal, or how deforestation is threatening the habitat of a bunch of animals. They might not like what they hear, but they'll feel pretty happy about their life.
When their standard of living declines and they have to cut back to make ends meet and they watch their children struggle in ways they didn't have to at their age and their grandma actually dies because she went outside people start to get upset and suddenly the constant news stories about the latest pointless trillion dollar war, and the politician stealing from taxpayers, and the huge decline in wildlife populations starts to hit differently.
You can buy current cars that do not require any subscription services. For example on my 2025 Hyundai here is what would stop working without a Bluelink subscription.
• Anything you do through the Bluelink app.
• Automatic calling for help after a collision, enhanced roadside assistance (sends GPS coordinates to help center so you don't have to know where you are to get help), and features to track and immobilize stolen vehicles.
• The navigation system loses access to live traffic data and live routing (routing the frequently checks with a server to update routes based on live and historical traffic patterns). Local search also degrades or maybe goes away.
• OTA updates for the navigation system. If you want to update its maps and databases you can download the update from their site to a thumb drive, and then install it via that.
What keeps working:
• All the driver assist and driving safety features like adaptive cruise control, lane finding/keeping, cross traffic warnings, and similar.
• CarPlay and Android Auto.
• The radio in the infotainment system. You can connect your phone via Bluetooth or USB (without using CarPlay or Android Auto) to stream music and handle phone calls.
> Yes, it's nice that computers and phones are super cheap and powerful.
It was nice, but that's quickly changing now that the consumer market is being ignored by chip makers who'd rather sell to companies building data centers
There's no problem with having a unique fingerprint. The problem is having a consistent one. Randomize the fingerprint every time and you're fine. The IP address problem applies to everyone, including anyone using tor browser. The only solution to that is not using your own IP address (VPN/proxy). If I were going to make a secure privacy focused browser it either wouldn't allow things like rendering SVGs (which have introduced vulnerabilities beyond tracking) and wouldn't allow much (if any) JS and only a sane subset of CSS.
This is a bad idea though, because any newly discovered means to get even a single data point results in being able to ID every tor user. I'd be better to have every tor browser always generate a random fingerprint so that even if the unexpected happens people will never get anything but random results.
> to have every tor browser always generate a random fingerprint
Browsers do not "generate" fingerprints. They expose data that can be used to fingerprint users. You cannot "randomize" this; even if you were to return random values for, say, user screen size, with various visual side effects, it would just be another signal to fingerprint: "Oh, your browser is returning random values? Must be a Tor browser user".
> it would just be another signal to fingerprint: "Oh, your browser is returning random values? Must be a Tor browser user".
That's perfectly fine! As long as they can't tell which tor user you are they can't track your browsing activity or associate it to any one tor user. That's the goal. Currently tor browser sticks out like a sore thumb by trying to appear identical no matter who uses it, which is fragile because any one data point unaccounted for unmasks everyone.
Ideally you'd have browsers randomizing what they send instead of reporting the same info every time. That way even a deviation from the "norm" can't be assumed to ID someone.
When I go to https://noscriptfingerprint.com/ all I see is a blank page. My browser is pretty locked down in other ways which probably helps, but I'm still taking that as a good sign.
> fingerprinting in general is a less than ideal side effect that gives you a minor loss in privacy
In what way is collecting a record of a person's browsing history a "minor loss" of privacy. For many people, tracking everywhere they go online would easily expose the most sensitive personal information they have.
> ESLs are ecological: they can be updated and they last for years, it saves paper and ink! This is utter bullshit. Prices and products don't change that often
Prices didn't used to change that often, but now they can be changed several times a day (or even several times a minute) using automated systems. Cell phone tracking and cameras can allow a store to get information about you and your income and they can use that data to charge you higher prices for everything, or to strategically increase the prices of the items you buy most often while monitoring and tracking changes to your buying habits in order to take as much money from you as possible. That's the entire point. It's not about ecological savings, it's about economical gains.
> ESLs provide better price accuracy, what you see is what you'll pay
Facial recognition at the shelf and at the register can keep prices consistent for you as an individual even while those prices change wildly over short amounts of time. I doubt they'll let you modify the price displayed at the shelf and still give you that same price when you check out though. It'd be risky. If you were caught it might be treated like swapping bar codes or like terrorism depending on where you are.
> Some ESLs are NFC enabled. You can tap your phone to get more infos on a product
Making you sure you've got your cell phone lets them pull data off of it and fingerprint the device. The goal is to use that info to gather real time feedback about you from data brokers, like how much money you have.
By all means, mess with these systems for laughs, but it's going to take actual laws with teeth and oversight to keep them from being abused.
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