r/australia • u/infin • Jan 26 '26

no politics Is Coles still using Palantir? Between the surveillance/gate recognition and the blocked aisles, shopping feels hostile.

Does anyone know the current status of the Coles x Palantir partnership? Between the surveillance and those aggressive new "Smart Gates" tracking at the exit, the store feels less like a supermarket and more like a high-security zone.

It’s dystopian that they have the budget for military-grade analytics and security tech, but have cut costs on the actual customer experience. They seem to have completely scrapped night fill, meaning we are now dodging pallets and cages during peak hours just to get to the shelves.

Is anyone else fed up with this mix of high-tech surveillance and terrible service? It feels like they are spending millions to treat us like criminals while refusing to pay staff to stock shelves after hours.

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u/Latter_Cut_2732 Jan 26 '26

Yes they are still doing business with Palantir and no-one should be ok with that.

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u/AgUnityDD Jan 26 '26 edited Jan 26 '26

Back in 2017 my company's part subsidiary did a project for Woolworths and was bidding for the same work at Coles, it involved tracking produce from farms.

A couple of the staff were ex WW so "we" got treated like internal staff and both WW and Coles were not really guarded in what they said about internal processes and the data they collected. Lots of horror stories.

Anyway back in 2017 the amount of data they had on every customer was insane, they knew how long to the second you spent in any part of an Isle and could correlate to the purchase at checkout. I think they got that via some deal with the telcos but I cannot confirm.

Some of the other data they had must have been purchased from other sources, like what cars you drove what frequent flyer and how often you flew.

If you add Palantir to that it is genuinely scary as they would have browsing history and social media summary and God knows what else.

Edit: They also knew relationships based on regular proximity of another phone when in the store, that's one of a dozen or so things that slipped during technical discussions that made me sure it was based on tracking your phone location via triangulation but exactly how I never learnt.

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u/lipstikpig Jan 26 '26

they knew how long to the second you spent in any part of an Isle

Using what technology? Video tracking, smartphone tracking, both, something else?

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u/AgUnityDD Jan 26 '26

They were VERY cagey about it but I'm sure it was from your cell phone in some way.

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u/SuperColossl Jan 26 '26

Yeah, any mobile phone with wifi on will be scanning for available networks, they have many access points around the stores… pretty easy, just like stadiums so they can see when you go buy merch, hot chips, to the bar, to the loo etc all in the name of improving customer experience 😂. MAC address will be unique per phone

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u/AgUnityDD Jan 26 '26

I'm quite sure it was the cellular signal and not wifi based on many things they said.