For Walmart, which is investing in blockchain to track food suppliers and which has already patented technology to eavesdrop on customers in stores, it's another sign that retail is changing.

A Walmart exclusive Wi-Fi router, and others sold on Amazon & eBay contain hidden backdoors to control devices reports CyberNews.CyberNews researchers also discovered that ‘Wavlink’ branded routers, often sold on Amazon or eBay, contain similar backdoors (source).

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. retailers including Walmart Inc will add “Do Not Sell My Info” links to their websites and signage in stores starting Jan. 1, allowing California shoppers to understand for the first time what personal and other data the retailers collect, sources said.

Chief executives at Amazon, AT&T, Dell, Ford, IBM, Qualcomm, Walmart and other leading financial services, manufacturing and technology companies have issued an open letter to congressional leadership pleading with them to take action on online privacy, through the pro-industry organization, The Business Roundtable.

Customer value scores, such as those used by major retailers like Walmart, enable retailers to render “instantaneous, automated judgments about a consumer that may result in consumers paying different prices for the same product based on how much profit the algorithm decides a particular consumer will produce,” according to the petition.

Asda, which is owned by Walmart, and UK supermarket Sainsbury's both told the BBC they did not use image recognition cameras in their stores.

As the shopping experience improves, the retailer expects to see higher sales.“We really like to think of this store as an artificial intelligence factory, a place where we are building these products, experiences, where we are testing and learning,” said Mike Hanrahan, CEO of Walmart’s Intelligent Retail Lab and co-founder of , purchased by Walmart three years ago.

It’s one thing if you want to track the speed of a cart or its route through a store for marketing purposes but a desire to collect a user’s vital signs under the guise that you’re doing so to help sick or elderly shoppers or otherwise improve customer service is outright disturbing.

Sam’s Club — the members-only, Walmart-owned retail store — is taking a page from Amazon’s playbook by opening an experimental cashier-less “Sam’s Club Now” store in Texas.

The retail giant filed a patent for a internet-connected shopping cart that can measure and track biometric data. From there, it would be able to alert store associates that a customer needs a hand, based on the biometric data they received from the shopping cart handle.

"It is noted that the biometric data and the cart movement data collected during the use of the shopping cart is not tied or otherwise linked to the identity of the individual customer," the company said in its patent application.