Every week, millions of us shop at Coles. We scan our groceries, tap our cards, and go home.
But behind the checkout screens, Coles has partnered with Palantir – a CIA and Trump-linked surveillance corporation owned by a far-right billionaire, whose core business is building AI data and surveillance tech for actors like ICE and the US military.
Coles says Palantir is being used for internal planning purposes – but also that their tools have access to “10 billion rows of data” across more than 840 supermarkets. That’s all we’ve been told.
Coles collects vast amounts of data on us every time we shop. Its own privacy policy confirms it uses video and audio surveillance in stores, collects transaction and purchase histories, and tracks our device identifiers, IP addresses and web/app activity.
And right now, we don’t know whether Palantir has access – directly or indirectly – to systems containing our customer data or in-store surveillance feeds. …