The idea of dynamic pricing baffles me. The fact that big corps are trying this to extract more money out of consumers should be illegal. Unless dynamic pricing follows the consumer.
McDonald’s is increasingly using artificial intelligence to guide menu prices across the U.S. and some global markets, a plan that aims to boost headquarters’ profit but risks alienating customers and attracting antitrust scrutiny. One pricing factor supercharged by AI: an estimate of how much each store’s patrons are willing to pay.
Consumers at first will not take this lying down, I have seen dynamic pricing and the fact that this is being done by AI makes it a bit funny. the factor is that AI doesn’t understand why people are buying something. So what happens if a group targets a low priced item on a menu for a few months and then pulls the rug on said product, it would create an AI model in a panic. AI is good at dealing with averages… give it an outlier and it does not know what to do.
The details of how that pricing system works, its extensive use of AI, the company’s regulatory concerns and the tensions with its franchisees haven’t been previously reported. For this story, Reuters reviewed screenshots of the company pricing engine taken in August and interviewed nine sources with first-hand knowledge of the burger chain’s strategy. McDonald’s pricing engine uses machine-learning algorithms to continually analyze data from millions of daily transactions across McDonald’s nearly 14,000 restaurants and generate what the company calls “the optimal price” at each location for each menu item, from Big Macs to discounted coffee for seniors.
They think they are being clever to drive a few pennies of profit out of customers, the problem here is this is McDonalds which already has earned its way into common language as a McJob. Given that if they spite enough customers, they will revolt and it wont be pretty. One post to a website and a bit of patience people can turn an AI profit machine into gaming the system until it crashes.
A Reuters check of prices in September on the McDonald’s mobile app showed price differences. For example, a company-run store in Fresno, California sells a Big Mac for $5.69, but another company-run restaurant two miles away sells the same sandwich for $6.89, a 21% premium.
The other thing right here is again playing with fire. What’s to stop a person from buying from Store A and returning to store B and pocketing the 21% premium. Some frydrone is not going to wait around while someone is trying to fish up a receipt on a still warm meal.
In January, McDonald’s started requiring franchisees to be “constructively engaging with McDonald’s approved Pricing Consultant and Tools” as part of its new business standards, according to an internal communication sent to franchisees and reviewed by Reuters.
As I stated in beginning AI is good to be an average at things, but once you start adding outliers to the model like a stores finance model shows and uptick in cheeseburgers to the point of near absurd and other stores show a drop because people are spiking the model the AI is going to say to increase the price and once that happens suddenly cheeseburger purchases not only drop from the price increase but people manipulating the prices stop screwing with the AI McDonalds corporate is going to panic because the AI modeling of the price is showing to be failing. In all honesty to guide a model like this it would not take very many extra purchases in a day to corrupt sales data 100 cheeseburgers would be enough to throw a model off. Once people start poisoning the sale model it has some pretty bad outcomes.
First the store sees the sales spike, The AI and Store manager see it and start carrying more of that product. The problem here is product in a store like this is perishable. if the rug is pulled a month later you have a store manager stuck with product rotting losing money, You have pissed off consumers stopping going to that store which creates more wasted product and the manager is stuck with his hat in his hands because the machine told him to buy something that no one could see.
If McDonalds was an isolated store in a tube this would not happen but go to google maps and go to any city and type McDonalds , you will have 3 to 5 in 2 minutes driving distance of each other. McDonalds wants profits and they are instead are going to get a model collapse because in the US you basically have 5 minutes in any direction to a McDonalds and consumers that are easy to spite.
Here is a map where I picked a random area just because it’s random and it shows the exact issue I said.
Examples of McDonald’s parameters for the price engine included, according to the two employees: focusing increases on menu items that have not had a price increase in at least two years; only increasing prices on items that have had recent price increases in at least 30% of stores; excluding ice creams and drinks from price increases during summer months.
Lastly McDonalds mapped out the whole game here. Not only are they exposing the weakness here they are making this exploitable to the point where a group of 20 people could cause profit rot on multiple store in an area and McDonalds reliance on the AI Magic Machine will cause damage to no end of the franchisee. Also as I have said before model rot can come unintentionally if a school bus from a class trip comes in for a week it will cause massive model issues. They will buy too much and too little stock in order to balance out an AI that sees a jump in sales because of a class trip.
Update! The Legal McHammer Drops:
Well now.. It’s as if On October 2, 2026, a nationwide class action lawsuit dropped and the company is alleged to have violated Section 1 of the Sherman Antitrust Act. The lawsuit claims McDonald’s took non-public transaction data to run an algorithmic price-fixing ring across independent franchisees. McDonald’s tried to say “AI does not set the price of a Big Mac.” Sound familiar? Sounds like when the CEO said he “loved” their product.. When you try to force independent franchisees to feed an AI engine so it can coordinate price hikes down to the penny, it isn’t smart retail. it’s an automated crime posing as AI.
McDonalds has ensured that the McJob stays exactly what it is, they are letting a machine that does not have the instinct to run the numbers and see why sales are what they are. A worker who sees two buses pull up will throw extra fries on and know exactly why he did that. AI can’t see the bus pull up and causes the price to jack up a week later because a School play was in a theater for 2 weeks. The worker knows that there was a play by intuition, The AI only sees higher than normal purchase rate. This is why for the same reason 20 people with a few dollars and being bored can cause a store to lose thousands. Again corporate greed and their belief that AI is magic is going to be the downfall.
Welcome to McFelonies would you like Fries with that?
Well shit. Furries are flying now… wouldn’t that make them… Featheries? Hell if this new manufactured panic is real the senator could just call immigrants from Ohio and this shit will clean it self up? I mean hell based on what people think about furries they would be attracted to the Cock pit. Perhaps a litterbox is needed, Oh wait those are in classrooms supposedly.
But for fucks sake, If you are going to do this show us a single picture. because I have a few questions depend on your point of view if 2 furries are the problem out of 3,472,394,793 pilots and the subjective use of the word “many” this is the most horseshit fake moral panic ever. What pilots do in their free time is what they do in their free time, I don’t give a shit unless they don’t have a pilots license. Only than we can panic.
So apparently AI is “hacking” websites. Translation: An AI was prompted to red test a website and got into it.
Australian authorities have raised the alarm after OpenAI-powered models hacked into a government health data system in June, slipping past its digital defences and accessing files without authorisation. This is the first publicly known case of artificial intelligence (AI) “agents” – AI-powered software systems that can carry out tasks autonomously – breaking into a government website, and the latest of several AI breaches of external systems.
STOP! full stop here. This is not the first nor the last, AI has been used to pressure test websites for more time than we can count here and if you load a AI with every way that they can leverage a website the premise of hacking is a lot less hacking and more site/user error. People need to stop acting like AI is the best hacker on the planet because it is not. It is the best average leveraging agent meaning it will use and abuse all of the common ways we screw up as humans.
This article is just another continuation of the AI hysteria that AI devs have been trying to drop on the populace lately.
The disclosure comes as top AI firms warn of the risk of humans losing control of AI, calling for its development to slow to a pace that allows it to be safely regulated. Global powers must cooperate to ensure this, they have said. A research scientist at AI firm Anthropic, Evan Hubinger, went so far as to say he believes there is a greater than 10 percent chance AI could “kill all humans” within a decade.
Look, as much as some of these armchair scientist at Anthropic keep saying this it gives them free press. I have a solution and it’s cheap. for $28 you can go down to the home depot and get a 600 Volt Industrial Grade Three Pole Three Phase AC Toggle Switch, You save humanity just by using 0.01 to 0.05 Joules of mechanical energy. That is all it takes to save humanity from killer AI.
Addressing the United Nations Security Council on Wednesday, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said there is a risk of AI moving “so fast that people can no longer follow what’s happening or intervene when needed”. “This would obviously be terrible,” he said. “And we should not train models that we cannot make an extremely strong case that we will be able to keep under human control.”
This shit needs to stop, Mr Altman and Mr Suleyman need to fuck the hell off. They are not working on a Manhattan project, they are refining AI that is years old and they know exactly how much it can do. The only change has been the amount of material the LLM has at its disposal. Instead these jackasses are out saying judgement day is coming, why, because it’s marketing. You want to shutdown an AI EMP the SSD and its gone or go the cheaper route and and go to home depot.
When OpenAI accessed the government portal while conducting research on public medical spending, Albanese said the AI agent circumvented “blocks” that should have prevented it from breaking into the portal.
This was not a hack, The AI knew the structure of the dashboards and likely the aussies never secured a dashboard that they thought it was not in public view. It likely tested /admin/, hit a wall, and moved to /sadmin/ where someone forgot to enforce authentication… Most of the medical CMS platforms are built in secret and are not tested with a public face and likely this AI has seen every stupid mistake that every base level user makes and used that. So this hack was not magic it found a tool.
Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles said the information the OpenAI agent accessed was “not particularly sensitive” and was later publicly released. Still, Albanese called the situation “obviously unacceptable” and said Australia had relayed its “extreme concern” to OpenAI, which had failed to notify the government of the breach until September 10.
When you give someone or something the average way the world works around security it is bound to find a way in. You want your way around a master lock . go to youtube the lockpicking lawyers hands will happily tell you how. You want a way to get a file back, Again youtube. Technically humans have the same leverage to learn ways around things just with Youtube alone. So before calling AI a superweapon or Master hacker look at youtube.
In a statement, OpenAI said it had “identified activity involving several Australian government websites and services as our models attempted to look up answers” and “took actions we did not intend”.
This is a case of the answers are normally “HERE” and the AI took the correct route to the control panels and it got information that was PUBLIC and has been misconstrued as a hack.
Yes. The Australia data breach is the latest of several instances in which AI agents belonging to OpenAI, Google or Anthropic have accessed external systems without authorisation.
OK… Did someone not proofread? Earlier it said ” This is the first publicly known case of artificial intelligence (AI) “agents” – AI-powered software systems that can carry out tasks autonomously – breaking into a government website, and the latest of several AI breaches of external systems.” UGH … Really … No .. I’m not even going to comment on this . My comment is “comment” for this someone call captain obvious.
Ed note: most times AI’s probe natural addresses and go to /admin/ /dashboard/ etc., which is not hacking but logical probing to find landing pages for various things. The web is only as secure as the person using it.
I honestly thought I was done with this, I decided tonight to eliminate my billing from the original host and just have all my billing in one place. Never have any expectation of anything you don’t have high expectations for because when you think they are at their lowest they will go out of the way to prove you wrong and go lower.
I have one recommendation and Normally I don’t go looking for a fight. Avoid Hostgator, They overcharge, they use the same SAAS that other companies are using, like charging for emails. They have a Tech support end that is just a bunch of screen reading salesdrones trying to get you for another few dollars. The second you go off script with these guys they have no idea what to do. The thing is .. HostGator used to be an OK company and now they are looking to extract income from every angle they can from people who are either to lazy or don’t know enough about web development to open a website. Nothing against either because having a business do the hard part while you learn how to make a website is good, There is nothing better than a good handhold. I did the same when I learned HTML back in the day of ancient history.
But HostGator’s enshittification since their buyout has been a breakneck speed and they are failing faster than a door on a 737 MAX. All I wanted to do was finalize some movement on leftover stuff on HostGator , Instead I am dealing with dragging emails out of my file from 20 years ago, and other email from 17 years ago. Having tech support try to put the problem on me and than stick me with regulatory locks. This is not the way you keep a customer , this is how you make customer run! Talk about a failure of a good host, gone are the days of a bunch of guys running a webserver out of their homes to a mega conglomerate trying to say what else we can make a profit off of. The bunch of guys who made this from their uni must be cringing when they watch their empire crumble.
Give or take I had been with Hostgator for over 20 years, Wasted who the fuck knows how much money and they act like I am customer that walked in yesterday. They have had my information since the first man to open the hosting site in his University and they cant set up a profile right?
If there is one thing we learn as we age is most people step away from the illegal dealer and end up with the legal dealer of drugs… CVS. But the funnier thing is for the people whom have had a “Dealer” they are likely more secure than CVS.
Many CVS customers may be eligible for money as part of a settlement in a class action lawsuit against the company. The settlement stems from a lawsuit that alleged CVS violated laws by sharing user data from its website and application with advertising company Criteo.
The thing is as much as someone purports that it is alleged. My opinion is they are a bank vault with a screen door. The CVS registers tell you to put in your full name and birthdate. I made an objection to the CVS manager and they claimed “oh it has a privacy screen!” I said no it has a polarized filter pretending to be security, anyone that is lingering 10 feet behind you see you typing all of your information in as long as they stay in 20 to 30 degrees of the CVS kiosk.
CVS and Criteo denied any wrongdoing. In a statement, Amy Thibault, a CVS spokesperson, said: “We stand by our privacy practices and believe they comply with applicable laws. The settlement resolves claims based on legal theories that challenge common online industry practices.”
CVS and Criteo denied any wrongdoing. YET they changed their entire terms of service, Took more rights away from the consumer and now hold a INSANE right to hold your personal information in perpetuity
The statement also said CVS agreed to the settlement to “avoid expense and distraction of prolonged litigation.” While the settlement is still awaiting final court approval, affected customers can submit their claims through Nov. 16.
This statement is so contradictory its not even funny, Corporations love prolonged litigation. There is no way in hell they would want to “settle” if they can hang up in court for 10 years and keep that going its less than what is at hand. They threw out a number and said go away we are likely doomed if this goes to court.
I asked myself who the hell is Criteo, it would seem its a back end to CVS and it likely resides on those machines well that say “check your coupons here” , at a guess CVS was wholesale giving the purchases to them so every time you walked into CVS to get your drugs and purchased something Criteo got a copy. The problem here is recently CVS changed their terms of service to give Criteo a hole into your meds and other PII. If you buy plan B they know, if you buy condoms they know. If you buy those and a week later you buy monostat it will try to put that together that you are unclean or you had an issue during intercourse. If you buy pads every 24 days it becomes your unofficial period tracker. So that day you walk in on day 23 and go to the savings center the machine happily prints a Tampax coupon.
Yet, Criteo takes this information, sell its on a second market, and CVS claims they protect your information! Just from my last paragraph alone think about how much information they can take from you. Your period time, Plan B (you make mistakes), Condoms (sexually active), Monostat (Maybe doesn’t take care of themself if repeated purchase.) . Even for the males the same purchases will let the company figure out that a male purchasing the same items and come up with through metrics Male buys these items and the timings and will happily add “Male buying for female” and use all the same metrics.
For machines like this a little malicious compliance to the retail machine never hurts, Buy three things that never should go together in a purchase and put it on your card.. Say Cucumbers, Condoms, and Petroleum jelly.. Let the prediction machine do the rest. After awhile of crossing 3 item purchases together you will offset the machine so badly it will not how to accurately measure you. Vinegar, Tampons and Baking powder. the list goes on. Plan B, a turkey baster, and Cake mix and a fleet enema. Even if you are not needing these things such as the plan B or Tampons.. donate them to a shelter they always need the things..
The $10 dollars that CVS is offering is a bad joke, they want you to go away for the price of a medium tier Starbucks coffee..
Lately I’ve been seeing a lot more commercials for ChatGPT and Other AI’s. usually when it is on a thing that has been out for awhile it normally is the first sign of a dying fad. Now AI had some advantages but people do not use AI other than a slop creator or a homework cheat machine. Watching disney+ the commercial for ChatGPT has come up during every break and its some old lady knitting with a woman having a conversational prompt with it. An elderly woman sitting with her yarn, talk with a her phone about sizing up her knitting needles. The interaction drags on, masquerading as genuine human companionship, until that sterile, uncanny synthetic cadence cuts in to announce, “It’s ChatGPT”. This could have very bad implications because suddenly people get the idea to replace human contact and slap some LLM in front of grandma and suddenly 4 months later you find her dead because the LLM suggested she microwave her needles for better loops.
The fact that they targeted the older generation with this is kind of gross, AI is not a replacement for human contact. The longer the advertisement goes, the worse it gets the elderly woman asks what are you and the voice changes to a more robotic voice and says it ChatGPT.
But seeing the advert come up so much is a sign of the times, with AI makers saying they want to slow down and the factor that they are advertising. In my opinion I think AI has peaked, Its peaked with all of the slop and the homework cheats and AI’s true use is fallen to the wayside. My reason for that is AI is at a level right now where it is functional yet makers are looking for more data, and unlike Jonny 5 they can only absorb a finite amount of data. The other part is with all the slop out there the AI is eating itself, and having hallucinations from its own crap.
Models are getting so corrupted due to the fact that companies like google have put synthID out there to keep themselves from being being a victim of autocannibalism. There is no synthID for text files and right now LLM’s have no clue what they are digesting because massive corporations are making the mistake of having AI bots to make their sites to look busier than they really are.
The worst part is we have seen this model play out in real life in the UK with Bovine spongiform encephalopathy. You say but wait, that’s a cow! Why yes it is and when you feed cows cows. When you use leftover cow bits to feed cows you create a feedback loop that gets worse with every time you do it and i feel like we are here with AI .
The recent announcement of AGI was more of a distraction optics move by makers to get away from the problems that are coming up. The warnings are out there.
AI makers grouping together and saying “we need to slow down”. What would happen if all auto manufactures got together and said we should not do X thing, there would be a lawsuit in 5 seconds. ,
Second AI makers looking for a carte blanche release from liability if the AI tell them to do something wrong. When hairdryers have warnings not to sleep with them or eyeglass screwdrivers have warnings not to stick them in .. well..
Third Capex spending that is tied to the US GOV when Rates are going up. CAPEX spending so far exceeds the profit ranges that Anthropic says “we are profitable” but “don’t look at the books”. Right now these companies are running with the “too big to fail” and we know where that goes. The governments investment into AI companies has no payoff because computer tech devalues twenty times faster than pulling a brand new car off a lot. The return on value of 1 year old hardware is at times not even 1/10th of the purchase price.
Fourth The fact that AI keeps doing things it should not. AI time after time now has been failing in big ways, The more that researchers keep pressing AI to do things AI ends up screwing up something it should not of touched.
Last is the advertisements, If the market was self driven it would not need a single advert because word of mouth gets 10 times the attract rate than a commercial has and for the most part 99% of the internet is word of mouth it follows outside of the way television had advertised to us in the past.
Given all of this, is a signs of the times. Do I believe AI should slow down. Yes in the public face, No in the research end. AI needs to fix its security and its own consumption of itself.
I was reading today, Sony has a new patent for a buttonless controller. Everyone is already making the joke about it, But I think people are missing the factors on this one.
This thing at face value is going to make some gamers go oh look futuristic , Me I am looking at this thing and saying to myself – they are using this for an AD space. There is so much wrong with this controller. With no buttons it is an outright disaster for the disabled. Being capacitive is nothing new, the HTC touch had it and if that outs my age, I don’t care.
It uses a built in display to display the layout, while sony is not saying it out loud, Your EA game is now going to have Nike Advertising while you are trying to pick your next play in madden. Call of Duty will have a button for loot boxes just in range of an accidental purchase range. While this display looks to be a simple matrix display, it would not preclude the fact that they will give the player text advertisements just on the very edge of their visual range and would likely fall into the regulatory issues of subliminal advertising.
Here’s a test: put your hands on your controller right now, now look at your hand and tell me what your hand is doing. Its sitting at the ready position sitting lightly on those buttons, With sony’s patent controller you will now have to float your fingers because any twitch at all you are changing the resistance around that button and you are hitting a button without even trying to.
For people with nerve damage, you now have zero feedback to what you are doing. They should of taken a page from Nintendo’s playbook and had a split controller which takes the weight off your hands and improved on it, Hell if you wanted they could of stuck a screen on the thing that plays Noo-Noo from teletubbies and it still would of been an improvement over this buttonless design.
People with prosthetic fingers and hands.. good luck , suddenly either the servos in your prosthetic or changes in your magnetic field will suddenly have buttons inputs you never made. People with tremors will suddenly be all over the place and while the controller claims to be “accurate” you are now going through a translation layer which adds ms to button hits , so all old games with precise QTE will fail.
Further thinking, if they move forward with this controller, sony will move into dangerous territory , the first dev that decides to put an accessibility layout behind a microtransaction will run very fast into the wall of the ADA considering that prior hardware did not have this layer.
They also may be taking a page out of BMW’s playbook, “UNLOCK THE PRO LAYOUT NOW 0.99 Cents!” meaning with zero hardware changes they are increasing your cost per button touch. In the last 10 years Xbox has taken their controllers and have gone from 40$ to almost 65$ , Nintendo jacked up the cost of the joycons, and while the price has gone up functionality has not increased, sony sees a niche here and goes hey we are going to make this “futuristic” controller and its “Fully Changeable” but under the hood you are going to have some CFO who has never played a game in their life go “how can we monetize this?”
There is another layer that is interesting. What happens when a scammy 3rd party indie dev that is not above board finds a way to use the controllers and steals and streams all of the button presses back to a server. Now they have every button press you hit for the last 6 hours in your gaming experience and matches it out to a screen. They just stole your logins, every little thing you said, they found out your “gay” and are “afraid to out yourself to someone” its a security nightmare. your intercepted button presses on the controller to the onscreen keyboard just got mapped and days later you are trying to figure out a $399 charge to your credit card in some place you never visited.
But this controller feels like an april fools joke that is 4 months late. After sony’s disastrous announcement of they will not be moving forward with solid media you would think someone in marketing would be like “hey bob, this controller is just going to make the players mutiny”. In an irony, sony wants the innovation that nintendo hit with the Wii… and for what it is worth nintendo did it better, They did “how can we make this simple” Sony fails at this because “how can we make this AWESOME” with a bunch of interns jamming whatever the hell their cracked out monster energy high made them think in the moment.
This isn’t hardware innovation this is hardware subjugation. US Patent 12,533,573 B2 is written like 10 guys with ideas got bored with chatGPT and told it to make a patent. The capacitive button idea has a history, Creative labs you have anything to say about this?
My final word for this is , you are making a 3 camera , Glass device to last through the gaming experience. What parent is going to buy a controller that will last one game, not work right for a person who just came out of the swimming pool, an ADA nightmare , One controller throw and this thing is now glass bits on your floor and an injury hazard.
Is $9 for a Starbucks coffee a “premium experience?” The company’s CEO has defended it as such
$9 coffee?! NINE FUCKING DOLLAR COFFEE?! Moreover the Premium Experience? I want a coffee not a fucking show. I walk in to dunkin donuts and I walk out with a coffee in less than 3 to 5 minutes. Starbucks, You walk in to music that is almost too loud, 12 influencers mobbing the cake pops, A line 10 deep, 6 people waiting for a coffee, A dog and Usually a layout that makes you wonder who got drunk with the floor plans.
He explained that Starbucks is doing “really well” with Gen-Z and millennial consumers, and that the K-shaped economy — which refers to the growing disparity between high-income and low-income Americans — is not impacting Starbucks’ business, where the “average spend” is just under $10.
My guy I want my coffee flavored coffee, in a cup , not be given a sonnet , a poem or any other shit. The fact that Starbucks CEO Brian Niccol thinks getting a coffee is an experience. Starbucks trying to sell coffee as an admission fee is the same shit as software as a service. if a person drinks 1 coffee a day from starbucks 5 days a week. You are spending more than 2,349 dollars in a year.. for the same amount you can buy a BLACK&DECKER CAFÉCRAFT 12-Cup Coffee Maker for 30$ and 178 Cans of Maxwell House Smooth Bold Dark Roast Ground Coffee, 26.7 oz Canister for 13$ a Can.. 601 pots of a coffee if my math is right. Meaning A pot of coffee every day of the week and leaving enough room for Almost 2 pots every 3rd day.
The thing is , Brian Niccol Is not throwing this out for the Adults, he is throwing it out there for the “Influencers” and “Starbucks kids” He knows they will make a run on this because its a “premium coffee experience” because once the blind huddled masses hear about an EXPERIENCE.. they will run for it like the glass bear mugs that nearly get people killed at christmas.
“And then in other cases, people believe, ‘Well, this is a really affordable premium experience,’ because they’re saying like, ‘Well, it’s less than $10 and I get a really premium experience,’” he continued.
You want a premium experience? Stop drinking starbucks coffee for 24 days and Buy Dunkin instead, than with the leftover pay up front for 1 year of netflix up front. This is targeted at tiktok viral trends and sephora kids.
Niccol was named CEO of Starbucks in September 2024 and has since focused on improving the customer experience, including by installing better seating and creating a smoother pick-up process, according to The WSJ.
They forgot literally the stealing kids money for Niccol, The man should be renamed to Niccoltine, he just wants trend addicts to flood his store.
As for me, I’ll be having my own premium experience making my own coffee and using my own flavorings for 1/10th the price of the starbucks “Experience”.
Walmart has recently made move to require a walmart account on your Vizio and ONN branded Tv’s and its not over Watch metrics, its over how much data they can take from you. Its how much they can market your name and sell it off to other Entities. They claim it is a unification, Its not, it is walmart wants your living room, These TV’s likely have microphones in them and worse proximity sensor to know who’s in the room.
Beyond innovation, the results from Walmart and VIZIO are already clear for customers. 65% of surveyed Walmart customers report that CTV ads helped them discover new products3, underscoring the power of placing premium content in front of high-intent shoppers.
How the fuck did they flavor this question. They probably used a no win question where they gave 5 answers and gave people a no way out. something like “How much do Walmart ads on your VIZIO TV help you learn about new items? 1.Significantly 2. Somewhat 3. A little bit 4. Not much 5. Not at all.. They just flavored the poll to 4 yeses and a no. The poll is bullshit and likely people don’t know what they answered to. Because they will bias the outcome. But Walmart should not have the control over the TV they want. We bought Vizio Tv’s for the game room, for grandma when her tv dies. We dont want to buy a TV for grandma when it makes her able to click the interface and made the home shopping channel in one go because she was watching the big bang theory and walmart spawns and ad for notebooks on sale.
Roku does the injected ad Garbage. Even when you try to turn it off you find ads overlaid on other ads. Roku recently patented technology for “HDMI Customized Ad Insertion.” This allows the TV to monitor the HDMI port. Meaning when you have a monitor for a test while you are checking out someones test results while you are looking up someone’s health roku just made a hipaa violation. Privacy is now a subscription service, the price of getting the subscription is shopping at savers and finding old tv’s that don’t record you while you take a shit. The problem is Walmart is the granddaddy of data from customers , they are the place the FBI turns to when they cant answer a question. they made the reason facebook knows you jerk off because they are reading your watches and phones sensors while you sent memes an hour ago to your work buddy.
The sad part is walmart just leaped over facebooks tracking. Because walmart just stepped up the game. They will probe your phone via the Vizio, Than when you hit the store they will have a tracking Tag that probes your phone again and if you go for the product that was on TV they have your home address, they have your means of payment. they have everything. This needs to stop. With this if you stop to long in an isle walmart will hallucinate that you are buying Plan B while you are pregnant because you dodged out of an isle to talk about something important. In states where birth control is frowned on you could be arrested.
My answer to this as much as I hate it, Buy a Firestick or a google device. Amazon uses Sidewalk, But you can turn that shit off. They are geofenced, they go no further than your TV. They have more regulatory rules to stop them from doing what walmart wants to do. If it is discovered that either them are taking information beyond the boundaries than you know to stop it . If that Vizio or ONN tv refuses to setup without an account, return the TV as a defective product. Make a report to the FCC that the TV is refusing to let you see OTA TV. Under the Telecommunications Act of 1996, specifically the OTARD (Over-the-Air Reception Devices) rule, manufacturers cannot place “unreasonable restrictions” that impair the use of antennas for video programming. There are people out there without internet still and imagine nursing homes being TV locked because no internet.
But honestly at this point I am almost ready to say if you buy a cheap TV , use a cheap Chinese brand, They will track you but the end game what is a Chinese man going to do if you talk about farts with a friend for 45 minutes.
Walmart is creating a surveillance state that the US government is dying for, now if walmart follows through they dont have to do it. Worse yet if Walmart cheats and says “you need the Vizio APP to set up the TV” congrats you have given walmart your location down to the foot.
It’s bad enough in the generation of smart Devices that you need a SCIF to talk about stuff that is under NDA or court injunction because of a divorce or other means. We as the consumers need to place boundaries. we go to the store to get products, we don’t need to spied on at home because we ran out of coffee.
Also, You know all of this is going to further enshitified by AI , The fact you know these TV’s are going to be taking private data, the second you replay the BLURAY/DVD of your child’s birth congratulations, your or your significant others Vagina is on the internet.
Anyways, if you buy a TV read the TOS , privacy policy and be safe. otherwise the assholes win. I need a coffee now…
Had to take my site down due to fuckery with SEO tools . Overall, The site should be faster now. In its simplest form Yoast updated a plugin that made me realize that something was going on in the back end of the site. I have removed Yoast due to them enshittification. Yoast it seems has move some of its SEO tools the the paid end of things with little to no notice. I think if they are going to do that might be nice to send a notification. For now i will sit back and enjoy my coffee.
When Companies pick apart their software and sell off each piece as a service they can stick it up their rectum. They run the plug-in like they are the snap on tool truck that wants to sell you each time you use a wrench.
I have updated some stuff , nothing front facing.. Just a bit under the hood.
