Walmart

Over the last 4 months Walmart has been trialing facial recognition systems with Facebook in many of its US stores.

The newest cameras are being trialed at head level in the technology sections with a screen with the flashing word “recording” these are to ease the customer in to the fact that there are cameras watching and make them not look as scary.

Also more head level cameras are now at the entrances of the stores, facing in and out of the lobby area.

Walmart is commencing facial recognition of customers in order to target advertising and pricing using photographic data from Facebook. This probably isn’t a surprise to Facebook users that actual read the terms and conditions when signing up or when they agreed to updates of the terms.

Once the systems roll out Facebook information will be used from profile photos and also tags where people have identified you.

During the last month, Tracfone’s Net10 brand has been disappearing from many Walmart stores around the country, one can only guess that this is to put more emphasis on Straight Talk and Tracfone brands. Or they could even be testing some geo marketing.