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People without a digital identity will no longer have access to food, according to a false narrative also promoted in the Romanian media space.
Food only for the chosen ones
NEWS: “Supermarkets in the UK have started implementing a new digital passport system that denies ordinary citizens the possibility to buy food if they are blacklisted for non-compliance. According to images posted on Twitter this week, the supermarket chain Aldi has started denying access to people who don't have their digital passport on their phone. In a video that went viral, a man behind the camera shows viewers the barriers blocking access to the shopping area for those without passports. [...] Amazon and other companies have also recently launched similar stores in several countries.”
NARRATIVE: People who do not obey the digital dictatorship will be eliminated by having their access to food denied
CONTEXT: With the accelerated development of technology, more and more aspects of daily life are subject to transformations, in the sense of digitization and automation of operational processes. The goals of these changes differ from case to case and target the efficiency of activities, the reduction of execution times, or even the elimination of bureaucratic aspects and errors generated by the human factor. Such a transformation is being tested these days by a chain of consumer goods stores in England, an opportunity for conspiracy theorists to once again claim that digital camps are being established, where people will be imprisoned in the near future.
PURPOSE: Undermining the trust of the population in authorities and the entire political class, promoting the sovereignist discourse, provoking and amplifying social tensions.
In a highly competitive market, there will always be alternatives
WHY THE NARRATIVE IS FALSE: In general, the digitization of activities is carried out with the help of applications installed on the electronic devices that almost every citizen owns, be they computers, mobile phones or smart watches, etc. In the case of the test carried out in the London store in question, we are dealing with such an application, which is by no means a “digital passport”. Therefore, access to the store is based on a QR code generated by this application, and the customer's entire shopping experience is subsequently automated. The client does not have to pay when leaving the store, because smart cameras track the purchased items, calculate the total cost of the products and automatically withdraw the corresponding amount from the user's bank account, previously entered in the application.
It is obvious that somebody who does not use the application will not be able to benefit from this service, and the fact that in this way they are denied access to shopping can n be attributed to the store only in terms of a faulty management of the portfolio of potential customers. It is also worth noting that a shopping experience 100% independent of the interaction with a human operator has been implemented by the same store chain since July 2022 in the Netherlands, but that information escaped the attention of local conspirators at the time. The entire system of scanning customers and the products they buy, operational for almost a year in the European Union, is designed to protect the identities and privacy of buyers, in accordance with the strictest European data protection regulations.
In any case, the success of this technological approach ultimately depends on the degree of acceptance by consumers. The sales strategy of a store that is permanently empty, or with insufficient revenue to cover maintenance expenses, will certainly be rethought, in an extremely competitive market, with an increasingly informed public and unwilling to make extreme compromises when it comes to its basic needs.
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