Consumer Confidential: There may be a steep privacy cost if you park at this Trader Joe's
Parking and privacy aren't typically things that go hand in hand. That's changing.
Colin Shanahan discovered this during a recent visit to the Trader Joe's grocery store in Hollywood.
After parking his car in the garage — seldom an easy task, as any SoCal TJ's customer will attest — he was instructed by an attendant to download an app to his phone, register for service and use that for payment.
"Not wanting to give some random app a ton of personal information, I declined," the Hollywood resident told me.
The parking-lot attendant, he said, "let me off with a warning that I wouldn't be so lucky next time."
Shanahan, 35, a lawyer, feels like he shares enough of himself already with the tech world. "I don't need a parking garage also knowing about me," he said. "It just
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