They call it safety. They call it convenience, personalization, efficiency, loss prevention, and innovation.

Pay attention to what they are building beneath those words.

Your favorite companies are collecting more than your money. They want your face, license plate, location, movements, purchase history, work pace, attention, habits, relationships, and the predictions that can be made from all of it.

The store is becoming a data system. The delivery van is becoming a surveillance system. The parking lot is becoming a tracking system. The worker is becoming a productivity score. Your body is becoming an identifier.

Walmart filed a patent for a biometric shopping-cart handle designed to measure a shopper’s pulse, temperature, and pace, then transmit that information for analysis. The patent does not prove that the system has been deployed in stores, but it confirms what the company has imagined, developed, and sought to protect.

Sam’s Club, which Walmart owns, uses computer vision and exit-area cameras to capture images of carts and verify that the items were paid for. Walmart’s privacy notice says it may collect biometric information, including face geometry, and that automated license-plate readers may be used on its properties where permitted by law. The notice says ALPR data may be used for security, theft and fraud prevention, parking enforcement, and the safety of people and property.

Amazon is rolling out AI-powered smart glasses for delivery drivers. The glasses can scan packages, provide directions, capture proof of delivery, and warn drivers about hazards. Amazon says participation is voluntary and that the glasses include a hardware privacy switch.

What does “voluntary” mean inside a workplace where the company controls your assignments, productivity expectations, evaluation, and continued employment?

The United States Postal Service is testing forward-facing cameras in 100 vehicles in the Washington, D.C., area. According to 404 Media, the cameras can continuously scan roads and signs and map roadways and sidewalks. USPS says the pilot will help identify road conditions and support “community safety.”

Safety for whom? Who defines the threat? Who controls the data? How long is it kept? Who can search it later? And when does a limited pilot quietly become permanent infrastructure?

Kroger’s privacy policy says biometric and facial-recognition data may be collected in some stores for security and fraud prevention. Grocery and retail companies are also expanding loyalty systems, electronic shelf labels, retail media networks, behavioral tracking, and customer profiles that can connect what we buy to what companies infer about our income, health, household, race, location, and willingness to pay.

The Federal Trade Commission calls one form of this surveillance pricing. Companies can use personal information, behavior, location, and other signals to shape the prices, promotions, offers, or products an individual sees.

Palantir is entering everyday commerce

Zeta Global CEO David Steinberg said his company became a system of record for Gap and built a forward-deployed engineering team inside the retailer. He also said Palantir and OpenAI personnel were helping with the work.

Gap has not publicly confirmed a separate direct contract with Palantir. Palantir personnel participating in a data and customer-monetization environment inside one of the country’s largest apparel retailers is still significant.

Gap also allowed a World Orb inside a San Francisco store. The Orb photographs a person’s face and eyes to create a code intended to verify that the person is human. The arrangement became visible without a clear public partnership announcement from Gap.

Chipotle is working with Palantir on a system that monitors food-safety risks, including pest incidents and employee illness.

Food safety matters. The architecture chosen to manage it matters too.

Palantir is deeply tied to military, intelligence, immigration, policing, and government surveillance. Palantir and the Israeli Ministry of Defense announced a strategic partnership during Israel’s assault on Gaza. When technology shaped by war, policing, and intelligence enters restaurants, apparel companies, customer databases, and worker-management systems, we should refuse to treat it like an ordinary software update.

Surveillance is also a lesson in consent

We should be able to say no.

But what does consent mean when surveillance is built into the infrastructure of daily life?

Our homes have connected devices and doorbell cameras. Our phones hold apps, location histories, contacts, searches, and payment records. Wi-Fi and Bluetooth signals reveal proximity and movement. Cars and license-plate readers document travel. Stores connect loyalty accounts, purchases, apps, cameras, and third-party data.

Each device adds another data point. Together, those points can create a persistent digital fingerprint of where we go, what we do, what we buy, who we know, and how we live.

Opting out can begin to mean opting out of participation itself.

Surveillance never lands on neutral ground

Black shoppers have long been followed through stores, treated as suspicious, falsely accused of theft, and forced to prove that we belong in spaces where our money is welcomed.

Facial-recognition systems and private watchlists can automate that suspicion and give it the appearance of objectivity.

In 2023, the Federal Trade Commission filed a complaint and announced a proposed settlement alleging that Rite Aid’s facial-recognition system falsely flagged shoppers as suspected shoplifters. The FTC said the system was more likely to generate false-positive matches in stores located in plurality-Black and Asian communities than in plurality-White communities. The proposed order would prohibit Rite Aid from using facial recognition for surveillance for five years.

Rite Aid disputed the allegations. The company said they concerned a pilot program deployed in a limited number of stores and that it had stopped using the technology more than three years earlier. These were FTC allegations addressed through a proposed settlement, not findings after a trial. The harm described in the complaint still shows how automated suspicion can intensify discrimination already built into retail spaces.

Black communities are also more heavily policed. License-plate databases, private camera networks, retail watchlists, and commercially collected location data can create new routes from an ordinary movement to police attention. A trip to work, a grocery store, a protest, a clinic, or a loved one’s home can become part of a searchable record.

The economic harm matters too. Systems designed to predict willingness to pay are built inside an unequal society. They can learn from segregated neighborhoods, limited access to stores, credit histories, purchasing patterns, and financial stress. People with the fewest alternatives can become the easiest people to profile, manipulate, or charge more.

Many of the workers placed under the closest monitoring are Black and brown workers. The person wearing the camera, meeting the algorithmic quota, being scored for productivity, or disciplined through data often has far less power than the company collecting it.

In a society that has repeatedly defined Blackness as a risk, every new system for identifying “risk” deserves scrutiny.

The quiet bargain

The bargain being offered is simple: Give us more access to your life, and we will make things safer, faster, and more convenient.

James Baldwin taught us to interrogate the innocence people claim when they benefit from systems they refuse to examine. bell hooks showed us how domination is reproduced through ordinary institutions. Toni Morrison made us look closely at who power names as dangerous and who gets protected by that naming. Alice Walker’s work points us toward community, wholeness, and responsibility for one another. Octavia Butler understood how frightening futures arrive through normalization and adaptation.

Their work has shaped how I examine power, Black life, love, liberation, community, responsibility, and possibility.

So I am asking us to look beyond the individual product announcement. Follow the data. Follow the money. Follow the relationships between the retailer, the technology vendor, the data broker, law enforcement, and the government.

Surveillance is meant to discipline us

This network is being built to do more than catch theft, route a delivery, or personalize an offer. It creates the power to reconstruct our movements, relationships, purchases, work habits, health decisions, political activity, and speech.

People behave differently when they believe every movement can be recorded and searched later. They may avoid a protest, a clinic, a union meeting, a place of worship, or a political conversation. They may decide that speaking up at work or online is too dangerous. Surveillance can police behavior before anyone is arrested, fired, denied service, or formally accused of anything.

We have too much evidence to treat this as paranoia. Government agencies have monitored lawful protest and political activity. License-plate systems can reveal visits to sensitive locations. Social-media surveillance has targeted activists and marginalized communities. Technology companies and their leaders routinely sell deeper tracking, prediction, and behavioral control as progress.

This is also why the overturning of Roe v. Wade was such a gut punch. Roe located the abortion decision within a constitutional right to privacy tied to the liberty protected by the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause. When the Supreme Court overturned Roe in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, it removed federal constitutional protection for abortion and weakened a major expression of bodily autonomy and decisional privacy. The Dobbs majority said its decision did not decide other privacy precedents, but Justice Thomas explicitly invited the Court to reconsider substantive due-process decisions involving contraception, private consensual sexual conduct, and marriage equality.

Privacy determines who gets to make intimate decisions about our bodies, families, relationships, movements, and beliefs without corporate or government interference. Once privacy is stripped away, freedom becomes conditional.

What responsibility requires

Before surrendering more information, ask:

• Exactly what are you collecting from my body, device, vehicle, purchases, movements, and behavior?
• Is participation truly optional, or will refusing cost me access to work, service, pricing, safety, or opportunity?
• Are you using the data to identify, score, price, discipline, manipulate, or predict me?
• Which vendors, data brokers, law-enforcement agencies, government bodies, and future buyers can access it?
• How long will you keep it, and what prevents you from repurposing it later?
• Can I see, correct, delete, and permanently withdraw my data?
• Who is accountable when the system is biased, breached, misused, or wrong?

Workers should ask what monitoring tools measure, how those measurements affect discipline and pay, and whether collective-bargaining agreements address them.

Marketers, technologists, analysts, consultants, and retail leaders must ask what they are helping normalize. “I only worked on one part” does not release anyone from responsibility when every part helps build the same machine.

Individual action will not dismantle a system this large, but reducing what we surrender still matters. We can:

• Refuse optional facial, iris, voice, fingerprint, and other biometric enrollment. Ask for a non-biometric alternative.
• Turn off precise location, background tracking, Bluetooth access, local-network access, and unnecessary camera or microphone permissions in retail and delivery apps.
• Delete apps and loyalty accounts that demand more information than the service requires. Shop without identifying yourself when that is realistically possible.
• Use the privacy-request pages provided by companies to ask what they hold, opt out of sale or sharing where the law allows it, and request deletion.
• Question cameras, smart devices, digital displays, and workplace monitoring instead of accepting “safety” as a complete explanation.
• Support worker organizing, privacy legislation, biometric protections, data minimization, and real consequences for misuse.
• Stop patronizing companies whose surveillance practices violate our values, and redirect our dollars toward businesses that respect our communities.

We should also be prepared to move our money.

Calling these companies out matters. Documenting what they are doing matters. Refusing to let polished language like “community safety” end the conversation matters.

Pressure becomes more powerful when it is connected to organized action, worker protections, stronger law, and conscious decisions about which companies receive our dollars and data.

In Good Company

YK Hong’s Liberation Toolbox is one of the resources I value in this work. YK connects liberatory strategy with tech justice and offers practical tools for opting out, reducing dependence on Big Tech, challenging biometric theft, and understanding technological colonialism.

Start with the Liberation Toolbox’s ongoing resources on opting out of facial recognition and biometric collection, then use what you learn to make changes in your own life and share the tools with your people.

No toolbox can make mass surveillance safe. It can help us become less available to it while we organize for structural change.

Retail is political because retail is one of the places where power becomes intimate. It reaches us through food, clothing, employment, transportation, health, and the ordinary routines of daily life.

The question is no longer whether we are being watched.

Threading the Needle

My work helps people see what is already around them differently, then use what they see to live, work, connect, and contribute with greater intention.

Threading the needle here means holding two truths at once. We live inside these systems and can’t step fully outside them. We still decide what our labor, money, data, attention, and participation will help sustain. Seeing the surveillance network is where the work begins. What we build, protect, and strengthen instead is the work that follows.

Peace,
Izetta Henderson
Founder and Principal, Beauty Boone