Walmart to WhatsApp: The Hidden Systems Mapping Your Behaviour

Dec 8, 2025

Ahmed Hassan, a security practitioner from Great Dynamics, dives into the underappreciated world of corporate surveillance. He reveals how retailers track your every movement and emotion using advanced camera networks and phone sensors. The conversation exposes the alarming truth about dating apps targeting loneliness via motion analytics. Ahmed also discusses the misuse of burner phones and offers insights into bespoke OPSEC services for travelers. Listeners are urged to prioritize their privacy in a world where data is the new currency.

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INSIGHT

Corporate Surveillance Outpaces Governments

Corporations have built the most powerful surveillance system by harvesting everyday sensor data from phones and cameras.
This system predicts behavior and emotion more effectively than many state actors, forcing privacy responsibility onto individuals.

ANECDOTE

Guest Learns From The Podcast

Ahmed admitted he felt embarrassed learning new OPSEC concepts from the podcast despite his professional background.
He praised the podcast's practical, practitioner-driven approach to teaching privacy and security.

ANECDOTE

Hardening Family Devices

Alan described helping his parents install hardened devices like GrapheneOS to protect them.
He contrasted that with his father's reluctance to change long-held phone habits and numbers.

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For the past decade, people have underestimated the most powerful surveillance system ever built, not by intelligence agencies, but by corporations. Every movement you make, every store you walk into, every website you open, every conversation near your phone, it’s all collected, correlated, sold, and fed back into behavioural models more invasive than anything that Langley or the Kremlin could ever have dreamed of.

Your phone doesn’t just listen. It watches how you walk. It measures how you move. Not only that, but it predicts your emotional state, loneliness cycles, purchasing intent, and even what you’ll search next, before you search it.

And you’re paying for the privilege.

In this episode of The OPSEC Podcast, Allen and Ahmed break down how modern surveillance works when everyone (from convenience stores to dating apps to foreign intelligence services) is harvesting your data. Not by hacking you, but by exploiting the sensors you voluntarily carry.

You’ll discover:

How retail stores use enhanced camera networks to track your movement, biometrics, and purchasing behaviour

Why your phone’s gyroscope, accelerometer, and Bluetooth signals can identify you even if everything else is turned off

How dating apps use motion-sensor analytics to determine when you're lonely, then target you.

Why are executives travelling to China with their personal phones are walking SIGINT targets.

The truth about burner phones, why 99% of people use them wrong, and how surveillance teams detect them instantly.

Why Europe is sleepwalking into a surveillance state through digital ID, KYC expansion, and anti-encryption laws.

The hidden danger of bringing compromised devices back into your home network after international travel

How modern ads appear seconds after conversations, and why it’s not a coincidence

Privacy isn’t dying, it’s being optimised out of existence.

Your devices broadcast more intel about you than most people will ever realise. And unless you actively shut down those signals, someone is always listening.

Your privacy is your responsibility. Do your due diligence, or accept the consequences.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.