Lindsay Owens, President and CEO of Groundwork Collaborative, released the following statement after Walmart’s Executive Vice President of Corporate Affairs issued a public letter in response to Owens’ revelations about the company’s pricing practices.
“The confusion around Walmart’s pricing practices is of its own making. Walmart says one thing in its damage-control letters to customers, another to its investors behind closed doors, and a different thing entirely to the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
Our analysis of Walmart’s patents spanning more than a decade is sobering. The arsenal of technologies the company is building that can be used to profile and track us should worry every American who is concerned about their privacy and pocketbooks. This personal data, according to Walmart’s own patents, is a critical element of the new pricing strategies the company is developing. Today, I am releasing a new analysis of Walmart patents so Americans can decide for themselves.
I also have serious concerns about Sparky’s capabilities and the safeguards governing the information it can access. In light of the recent Hugging Face incident, and research examining hundreds of thousands of AI-agent experiments, Walmart should answer basic questions about what data Sparky can see, how that information shapes the recommendations and purchases it makes, and whether sensitive consumer information could be exposed, misused, or used against shoppers – information that the company’s own head of media and advertising platform, Walmart Connect, called “gold” for steering product recommendations.
My life’s work is studying and improving Americans’ financial well-being. I welcome a conversation with anyone who desires to do the same.”