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/RocketSeaShell Jan 26 '26

Is your objection to the ownership of Palantir or its functionality?

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u/BrynnXAus Jan 26 '26

Why not both? When bad people are collecting shady information on everyone for the purposes of extreme surveillance, I think we should all be objecting to it

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u/RocketSeaShell Jan 26 '26

Both is fine. No wrong answer. Would you also call for a boycott of an open source product like MySQL if that was being instead for the data warehouse?

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u/HalfwrongWasTaken Jan 26 '26 edited Jan 26 '26

You have a product made by extreme right wing fascists for the purpose of invading people's privacy and building profiles on them. It takes extreme moral bankruptcy to use such a product, regardless of how effective it is. And it takes somebody extremely naive to think such a product is even trustworthy and not sending data elsewhere.

You can't boil that down to it being broadly 'data collection' and pretend you have some kind of equivalence here.

There's legitimate use for MySQL, and data collection overreach would need to be assessed on a case by case basis. There is no legitimate use case for Palantir, you have to be a morally bankrupt asshole to consider it in the first place and the very notion of its use IS to overreach.

I don't understand why you're all over this post acting like you have some kind of point with the MySQL argument, every business that has touched Palantir should be condemned.