Walmart's Privacy Policy Has Let It Collect Your Face, Voice, and Fingerprints for Years. Two of Those Are Still in Court.
Walmart's privacy policy has quietly authorized collecting your voiceprint, face geometry, iris or retina imagery, and fingerprints for years — not a new disclosure, just one almost nobody reads. It's newly relevant because two Illinois lawsuits are active right now over exactly two of those categories: a customer voiceprint suit over its AI phone system, and a separate employee suit over fingerprint time clocks. A third suit, alleging Walmart used facial recognition against shoppers, was filed and then voluntarily dismissed in 2022 — Walmart denied the underlying claim at the time, and this pass found no sign the case was revived.
The FTC Banned Rite Aid From Using Facial Recognition for Five Years. It Was Already in Bankruptcy When the Order Landed.
For eight years, Rite Aid ran facial recognition in roughly 200 stores — concentrated in lower-income neighborhoods and neighborhoods that were majority Black, Latino, or Asian — with thousands of false alarms that got real people followed, confronted, and searched, including an 11-year-old girl. The FTC banned the company from doing it again for five years, and issued no fine: Rite Aid was already in Chapter 11 when the order came down. It liquidated in October 2025, after a second bankruptcy. Meanwhile most major retailers won't say whether they're doing the same thing right now — and separately, one Kroger shopper who used an Oregon data-access law to pull their own loyalty profile found it had been shared with more than 50 companies, including an "income predictor."