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Comment by dilandau | Hacker News Reader

(triggered)

I mean, I carry my phone around in my pocket, so I kinda expect at least big Google is watching me. And probably the cell network. And probably the government, passively.

But RITE AID? What the hell, a fucking pharmacy? I mean: the customer is typically just buying whatever their doctor prescribes them. I guess they have aisles of cosmetics and cold medicine and stuff, but still, this seems remarkable for its banality and at the same time invasiveness. It's the worst kind of evil: stupid evil.

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I switched to a PinePhone recently and have another I'm putting Andoird+miniG on, so I have at least one thing out of the way.

I never sign up for loyalty programs (phone number), but I still pay with a debt card (I'm not sure if store can track people without violating card ISO agreements, but I suspect they can with hashed numbers), so I'm not full RMS/cash only.

As far as shrink prevention .. eh. I don't have a big issue with that. I've watch a woman just walk out with shit in an inner city store. Dude in line was like "She just walked out with two wine bottles," and the cashier was like, "She does that all the time. If the guard is here, he'll stop her. I'm not paid enough."

The article makes a big deal about certain neighborhoods. I'm pretty sure they just selected the stores with the highest reported shoplifting losses. Trying to read more into it is giving the data more intrinsic intelligence or prejudice than it has.

Fricking bevmo makes you get a SMS message to confirm your phone number.

>> But RITE AID? What the hell, a fucking pharmacy? I mean: the customer is typically just buying whatever their doctor prescribes them.

I don't know about Rite Aid, but Walgreen's is pretty much the 'corner store' in many neighborhoods.

Same with Rite Aid. (Actually, Walgreens bought up a bunch of them recently.)

Pharmacies are big business. If you think this is impressive, you should see what CVS is up to these days.

> But RITE AID? What the hell, a fucking pharmacy?

It all revolves around profit maximization. Late stage capitalism will be the downfall of many countries.

I think it's a factor of these systems being cheap. Cheap software, cheap cameras, cheap storage, cheap compute. It's a shame we don't have a better use for all that stuff.

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