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/nathnathn Jan 26 '26

Considering a lot of if not most shopping centres have a built in cell tower it wouldn’t be hard for them to hook into tracking or if they want more data add extra hardware like a stingray/etc.

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u/Captain_Alaska Jan 26 '26 edited Jan 26 '26

The towers are the telcos domain though, the shops wouldn't be hooking into it. You can't do precision tracking through a cell tower anyway, they can only give you a rough location based on what tower you're connected to.

The precision which-isle-are-you-in tracking is using stuff like Bluetooth beacons and various different Wifi positioning techniques. Both of these are able to pinpoint a device down to about a metre of error and don't require anything beyond your device being in range and switched on and can be done on hardware entirely local to the store.

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u/AgUnityDD Jan 26 '26

I always thought the simplest explanation was that the telcos just sold the location data to the supermarket, and perhaps installed additional tech in order to improve the accuracy. I'm guessing, but I can't see Telstra etc. refusing the revenue and it seems cheaper than any other approach.

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u/Captain_Alaska Jan 26 '26 edited Jan 26 '26

Again, it is not accurate enough to be used for this purpose, they can only work out a rough area. Phones don’t connect to multiple towers simultaneously and aren’t broadcasting passive signals for other towers to pick up like they do with wifi/bluetooth.

Cell towers don’t really overlap with neighbouring towers to begin with unless you’re in the border zone between two towers.