Lowe's and Home Depot are sharing customer data with law enforcement

47 tways_surv 18 8/8/2025, 1:18:10 PM flowingdata.com ↗

Comments (18)

burnt-resistor · 4h ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flock_Safety#Person_lookup_too...

ICE and Palantir are definitely motivated to also get involved.

Social credit scores and pre-crime in America isn't far off.

idiotsecant · 4h ago
This seems like fundamentally the information that is being shared is 'this vehicle entered the parking lot'. That information is also accessible by looking at the parking lot with your human eyes.

Definitely not a great trend for police to be collecting more surveillance data but it's also not 'social credit score' hysteria worthy.

king_geedorah · 3h ago
Why would there be a need or desire to bring such an arrangement to fruition if it was not meaningfully different from somebody watching individual cars/parking lots with their human eyes?
01HNNWZ0MV43FF · 3h ago
If there was a cop at every single parking lot, every single checkout lane, every single on ramp and offramp, watching everyone's front door at all times, it would obviously be a police state
southernplaces7 · 4h ago
>That information is also accessible by looking at the parking lot with your human eyes.

There's a blindingly obvious and enormous difference between some random joe the doughnut-grubbing cop watching a Home Depot parking lot to see if certain cars enter it, and digital license plate surveillance data on all cars entering said lot being constantly mass-sent to some federal or corporate-federal database for correlation with reams of other data shared by these same companies and other sources.

Guess where the latter can indeed easily lead? To exactly what you dismiss.

burnt-resistor · 3h ago
This. After cell phone and internet carriers, retail financial providers, social media, data brokers, and AFRs and ALPRs from retail and commercial security systems will inevitably lead to for-profit intelligence fusion, especially when many $10B's of paramilitary/intelligence budget go shopping.
pstuart · 4h ago
If you've seen what ICE has done so far, and the "promises" made by the current regime, it's all valid to worry about unless you fall into the protected class of being a White Multi-Generational-Resident Evangelical Male.

That's not hyperbole, that's their goal and they're saying the quiet parts out loud now.

evanjrowley · 5h ago
altcognito · 2h ago
Though these aren't really cases where having some cameras in the parking lot and sharing with the FBI are going to identify the crime that's happening.
kjkjadksj · 3h ago
If only ICE were targeting criminals and not the economic backbone of our society.
staringback · 3h ago
Improper entry by alien is a criminal offense [1]

[1]: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/8/1325

amanaplanacanal · 2h ago
I personally didn't give a rats ass how someone came to be in the US. I'm much more interested in whether they are assaulting and/or stealing from people.

The bureaucracy around immigration is insane. Most of our ancestors didn't have to do anything to come here except just show up. And that worked out excellently for the US. Now we are killing the goose that laid the golden eggs.

autoexec · 1h ago
> And that worked out excellently for the US.

That worked out excellently for the US at a time when the US was more or less empty and the west had to be settled and the government was going out of its way to encourage people to come and tame the land. Unsurprisingly, centuries later the situation has changed significantly and it's now in our best interest to be slightly more selective and organized when it comes to bringing people into the country.

Regulating immigration is only going to get more important as more Americans are forced to move due to climate change/water shortages/desertification (already starting, about to get much much worse: https://www.forbes.com/home-improvement/features/americans-m...) and as the country does its part to help accommodate the 1 billion climate refugees who won't be looking to immigrate because they want more money or better jobs, but because they literally won't have homes to go back to.

We need to be preparing ourselves for some hard times, being much more careful about the number of people we let in, giving more thought about where we're putting them all, and making sure that we're enabling them to be successful after their arrival. Regulating immigration is important. It can be done without being as evil and heartless as possible. It's important that we don't let the cruelty of the current administration cause a backlash which leads us away from common sense.

mixmastamyk · 2h ago
I had dozens of family members that used to work in the construction industry. It was a path to the middle class. Instead, most of them had to retire early in poverty.

Though it’s local, it’s similar to outsourcing to another country. Something that is decried often here, when it affects us rather than someone else.

Refreeze5224 · 2h ago
The point still stands that people who committed "illegal entry" are the backbone of our society.

This whole immigration crackdown is about racism, not law and order. They would go after the employers of these immigrant if they actually wanted to stop it. Notice how they are considering giving farmers a break for employing "illegals", because they know how dependent our food supply is on them.

autoexec · 2h ago
> The point still stands that people who committed "illegal entry" are the backbone of our society.

If the "backbone of our society" is a heavily exploited and abused underclass of people being just a step above slave labor then I think this system needs to be changed rather than preserved. The sooner our society is forced to improve itself the more secure our nation and our food supply will be.

imnotjames · 2h ago
Aren't most overstaying their visa rather than improperly entering?
mixmastamyk · 1h ago
Visas are quite scarce for poor people, across the world.