Today's dystopian news.

On todays real life black mirror episode, target is now tracking you through their shopping baskets. A Target employee posted a video to TikTok filming a small black device clipped to a store hand basket, showing the ID number printed on it. That number is registered to Acuity Brands, the company that makes Target's ceiling lights. The device is a Bluetooth tracker that Acuity sells to retailers, and Acuity's own announcement says the tags attach to shopping carts to track their movement, so store staff can look at customer shopping behavior and monitor employee activity. The tracker connects to the ceiling, because Target put Acuity lights with Bluetooth chips inside them into nearly half its 1,800 stores. Acuity says the system works without the shopper downloading an app or agreeing to anything. These tags broadcast to the ceiling, so nothing is pulled off your phone, and Target has not publicly commented on this. The part worth worrying about is what Target has already written down about itself. Target's privacy policy counts your location inside the store as information it collects, and says it may link that with your app activity, your website activity, the ads you get shown, and your email. That same policy lists cameras that read license plates at its stores, voiceprints kept as biometric data, data brokers it collects personal information from, and training AI models as one use of what it collects. Target's app has already changed prices based on where you stand. A Minneapolis station found ten items cost $262 more inside the store than in the parking lot. Target changed the app after. Companies are increasingly trying to maximize profits by tracking almost everything about you, and companies that are ethical and actually care about you are getting rare. If you want to find ethical companies to support instead, you can use the Conscious Spend app to see ethics grades for almost every company.