Google Voice all day
I have a back up emergency use phone number with bare bones payg plan that I use. So does most of my kids. Shared. Between three States we likely confuse the hell out of them. 
I give them my real number, doesn’t matter much to me since I hardly pick up my phone anyway. Everything’s blocked except people on my contact list. So they go straight to voicemail and I check it at my leisure. If I don’t even want the voicemail I have the option on my phone to report spam and block forever so I don’t even get their voicemail anymore.
Problem solved.
What I wonder is … if they have your phone number they could then lookup your info … if they know your info then they could sell it to a marketing company… get about a million people signed up and you’re talking a lot of money.
That’s a pretty brilliant idea lol. Using made up numbers mean you could be causing some stranger the headache of spam calls & even end up unintentionally linking yourself to them.
But using a public business phone number means you aren’t harming other individuals. Let them spam call eachother 
Ya a lot of them are resorting to verifying numbers, how do they verify numbers in your experience? Do they rely on a callerid database to check your number or do they rely on sms verification?. Knowing the methods they use pin point us is crucial to beating them & reclaiming privacy. There was a post about one such phone number verification service caught in a lawsuit recently in this sub.
I engage with them using disinformation by only logging in on shitty burner devices / info and never touching them with actual accounts / without a VPN. Edit to add: also without the intention of getting rewards, just giving them shit data. Maybe scan a stranger’s trashed receipt at most.
Do they include discounts?
Wal-Mart is using your credit/debit card data. They are probably also tracking your cell phone.
economics when meeting privacy gets complicated, at least WalMart is doing *something* right, I suppose.
facial recognition is a thing for loss prevention.
Hold up, is your IMEI broadcasted in plain text for anyone to snoop? I thought they used bluetooth or wifi to track users.
Edit: you probably meant IMSI number, and either way i can’t find a source of this being a practical way to track users and it just sounds like you made it up.
I always used the information phone number, (area code) 555-1212.
Yes. I just scan my keychain barcode, and it still applies the discounts. YMMV from store to store.
That too.
And besides which, my pharmacy already knows what my prescriptions are. I can’t get them anonymously. Compared to that, letting them know I’m also buying tootsie rolls isnt too big a deal.
Bug off for thinking I’m making stuff up, here are links going back to 2013. I just misremembered what part of your phone they’re tracking, which is hardly deceptive or misleading.
Great idea! Those numbers are reserved for movies and therefore don’t connect to any individual.
That makes a big difference. Modern phones use MAC randomization for Wifi and Bluetooth, so tracking them is not so easy for stores.
What you should never do is install a store’s app and give it Bluetooth access (otherwise it can be used to track you with high accuracy using BT beacons in stores).
Did you read my post? those posts have nothing to due to the iemi number for your phone, you just made that up. they track you through broadcast from your bluetooth, the same way some of the signs that tell you how many minutes to the next exit work, they listen for blue tooth pings and track cars between nodes.
Those aren’t movies, 555-1212 is Directory Assistance (I.e. information) though I guess you have to be a certain age to know what that is;)