Congressman Josh Hawley on Walmart AI Surveillance Pricing Patent US20180240554A1 – System and Method for a Biometric Feedback Cart Handle
I want to ask you about a Walmart patent, an actual patent that the Walmart Corporation has. This is a patent for a shopping cart, and I think we have a graphic to this effect. This is a Walmart patent for a shopping cart that uses sensors to track the speed of your cart, your heart rate, your body temperature, and then feeds it into a server for analysis. I emphasize this is not a joke. This is not, AI didn’t invent this, sadly, but AI is going to use it. Walmart has this. Why would Walmart want something like this? Companies hem and haw and deny that they’re using things like AI surveillance pricing in many settings.
Dr. Lindey Owens on AI Surveillance Pricing by Walmart
Dr. Lindey Owens: I think if we look at what Walmart does and says in other settings, the technologies they’re building and bothering to patent, to get monopoly rights for, to monetize. If we look at what they tell their investors, if we look at the companies they’re scooping up, Walmart is buying up AI pricing tech companies who come to market offering new AI surveillance pricing technologies, it really paints a different picture of where this country is headed and where our economy is headed. This Walmart patent doodle is, you know, pretty horrifying, but it’s really just the first step, building out the ability to use cameras and cooler screens to take a look at what you’re doing, to use your grocery cart to monitor your temperature. All that is feeding into consumer intelligence scores, agitation scores that better estimate how much they can convince you to fork over for every item in that shopping cart.
Walmart AI Surveillance Pricing Patent US20180240554A1 – System and Method for a Biometric Feedback Cart Handle
