This IS potentially new as some of the plans involve using facial tracking from security cameras to identify customers and analyze them for their net worth so they can set prices to specific customers, rather than setting prices to specific situations. Also, anything that makes price gouging easier and easier to cover up is bad.
The point on this is the cars are broadcasting the numbers. Imagine your license plate including a loud speaker that shouted it’s number while the car was running. Tracking via plate requires line of sight. Tracking it in an automated way requires a good high speed camera, text analysis computer vision to log the vehicles, and storage for all of the images. In contrast, this signal is a repeating unencrypted broadcast. I could build a Raspberry Nano device that I can sit next to an intersection and capture the numbers of every vehicle that drives by. It is also just presumably storing the number and time, so years of tracking data could be managed with a gig or two of storage.
This is absolutely a threat, and I am surprised it is not actively exploited by companies like Walmart to track every vehicle which drives by their stores and enters their parking lots. Hell, Amazon has enough vehicles out driving around that they could pretty effectively generate profiles for every vehicle in a town just by equipping their trucks with scanners and compiling the data into a behavior analysis system. Every car which drives past is read and stored. It is truly worrying.
Yo ho ho. If purchase is not ownership, then piracy is not theft.
The ONLY way this is even remotely OK is if the OS is set to 18+ all other age verification laws are satisfied and I don’t have to provide even more intrusive information to random companies.
Easy, replace all price tags with qr codes that you scan with your phone. Then they can make the price whatever they want for whomever they want individually. More realistically they will use an categorization AI to put people into rulesets which set their prices.
Here is a great video to illustrate and educate: https://m.youtube.com/shorts/acpd3UXQdmw
And an article to back it up: https://www.fool.com/investing/2026/03/05/walmart-rolls-out-digital-pricing-could-the-ai-fue/