Walmart, the US-based multinational retail corporation, was last week granted a patent for a new listening system that could be used to listen on shoppers and employees. Walmart, the world’s largest company by revenue — a reported $500 billion in 2018 — and also the world’s largest private employer with over 2.3 million employees, claimed in its patent filing that it was “an example system for capturing and analyzing sounds in a shopping facility.”
The proposed listening system, which can detect the rustling of shopping bags and the beeps at a register, could be used as an anti-theft solution to find out if number of items in a transaction and number of bags used checks out.
However, the fear is that the system could in addition be used to monitor employee interactions with customers and possibly monitor what customers are saying in real time about products. The patent filing adds that “the sound sensors can capture audio of conversations between guests and an employee stationed at the terminal. The system can also process the audio of the conversation to determine whether the employee stationed at the terminal is greeting guests.”
Advanced monitoring systems to track shoppers and employees is not exactly a new idea. Walmart’s retail rival and online retail giant Amazon has been busy testing its cashier-less Go retail stores in different locations for two years now. Those stores monitor the individual movements of shoppers and employees, all the way down to their gait and physical appearance, to keep track of which items are being taken off shelves, so Amazon can charge you automatically when you walk out.
Walmart said that it currently does not have plans to deploy this system in its retail stores anytime soon. But the patent filing proves that one of the biggest retailers in the world is actively thinking about the future of shopping and retail security. Whether or not your privacy can be preserved in the future while shopping for paper towels is now up for debate.
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