Your personal data, including your precise location, browser history, and even your mouse movements, is being used by some companies to show different prices for the same products—a phenomenon the FTC has dubbed “surveillance pricing.”
According to a new FTC report, retailers are hiring “intermediary firms” to algorithmically tweak and target their prices.
“Instead of a price or promotion being a static feature of a product, the same product could have a different price or promotion based on a variety of inputs—including consumer-related data and their behaviors and preferences, the location, time, and channels by which a consumer buys the product,” the FTC says.
Doesn’t this open up a clear pathway way to discrimination?
Even AI and data has bias, add that with malicious intent, and what stops a grocer from charging exploited communities higher prices?
Look at who’s coming into power tomorrow, and who’s sucking him off the most. This shit is about to get ten times worse.
Companies like Amazon been doing this for a long time. Yes, it’s discriminatory. No one has done anything about it. And they probably won’t for at least another 4 years.
4 years
If we’re lucky. And even if we have another president and that president is a Democrat and even if that president has a Democrat super majority in the House and Senate, I am not convinced that they will prioritize breaking up monopolies.
Correct, DNC is there to ensure that Democrats never do anything too much to hurt the owner class.
100%
They only take action to punch down any potential actual left-leaning candidates, ensuring no progressive representation ever gathers power stations.
Well, they certainly didn’t for the last 20 years. They tried in the last 4 but were ultimately too inefficient and time ran out. But they definitely won’t in the next 4.
Why 4 years? Edit: oh… Oh no.
Buckle up, buckaroos!
Yes but its a computer and computers can’t have biases! /s
And even if it did, you can’t arrest a computer!
They don’t care if you got black or white skin. They want to syphon your money.
If only they made data harvesting illegal 20 years ago
Even today I see many bemoaning the GDPR’s “onerous” obligations. Data just isn’t seen like the nuclear waste it is, sadly.
walmart rolled this out and call it “dynamic pricing” I have known for half a decade that a VPN can yield me discounts and you get different prices by region for the same product, like an ISP. For the most part it seems simply being unknown provides the desired outcome. I don’t think any part of dynamic or surveillance pricing is designed to ever bring a price down over learning about someone.
Including consumer related data.
This feels to me like “we know this user will typically spend the asking price rather than wait for a discount, so they will always get full price offers” or “according to cookies and other data this user also browses high end products elsewhere so we will offer inflated prices or higher ‘shipping’ costs and they will never question it”
I was thinking about the airport monitor that shows only your flight info because it can detect you and id you. And how many stores now have digital price tags on the shelves they can change remotely. Combine the 2 and you can have custom pricing per individual irl. 2 people standing next to each other in walmart be looking at the same thing and seeing different prices on the same display.
Yeah i see. I have heard a similar angle of the same tactic for ‘smart trolleys’ where your shopping trolley/cart has a tablet device you scan your customer ID with and then scan items as you shop directly into your cart and when you leave you simply pick your bags out of the trolley and walk out with automatic debiting.
However who is to say what price you see on your screen vs the guy shopping next to you like you just said, tech will really be used for the worst purposes unless regulations are in place.
Why don’t Americans put pressure on legislation like Europeans did with the GDPR?
Because they work three jobs to get food on their table and have to remortgage their house to pay for an ambulance. Privacy is a first-world problem and the US is a third-world country.
Because, for the last four or five decades, the wealthy in America have used assorted media to foment never ending religious, economic, and racial culture wars between different elements of the middle and lower classes. That constant state of conflict keeps the American people from ever being able to unite and accomplish anything at all.
Plus, the US effectively has no public broadcaster, so all news is for-profit news owned by massive corporations. Some news sources (like the Washington Post) are literally owned directly by the oligarchs. That means that what appears on the news is largely the stuff that’s designed to keep people watching – stuff that’s sensational, talking heads arguing about things in a way that gets the viewer angry, etc. Public broadcasters in other English speaking countries (ABC, BBC, CBC, and the like) often tackle important but somewhat boring news items because they take their duty seriously. That just doesn’t happen in the US. In addition, because news is billionaire or corp-owned, stuff that might threaten corporations or billionaires (or often stuff that might displease advertisers) simply never makes the news.
In addition, most Americans get nearly 100% of their news/entertainment from American sources, so they never see coverage of American issues from outside the US. They have no perspective on how things could be different. They might have heard a vague rumour that in Europe people don’t pay directly for healthcare, but they don’t really understand what that system is like, or what it might mean for their lives. That’s why it so easy to lie to them about how awful socialized medicine is, for example.
I can guarantee that more than 95% of Americans have no clue what the GDPR is, even though nearly 100% have encountered the GDPR-required cookie banner multiple times. They probably find it annoying but have no idea why it exists, or why it’s an unfortunate side effect of a very good law.
The other major problem is that due to money in politics and gerrymandering, it’s virtually impossible for Americans to influence their government. If you live in Arkansas and are a non-Republican or in Massachusetts and are a non-Democrat your vote effectively doesn’t matter, especially in the presidential campaigns, but also in just day-to-day races. In many cases, the only vote that matters is the primary, because whoever wins the Republican / Democratic primary is essentially guaranteed to win the election. Primaries are even less democratic than regular elections.
Importantly, there are only 2 political parties that matter, and both of them like this system. It is so much easier to raise money when there’s only 1 other option. It’s so much easier to retain power when there’s only one other option.
So, you can’t get Americans to put pressure on their governments because they don’t know that things could be different, and because they know that it’s hopeless to try to get the government to enact any policy that doesn’t benefit the wealthy donors.
That’s sad :/
Americans in aggregate simply don’t care. They don’t understand this, won’t take the time to understand it, and don’t care enough to understand.
Americans care but they’re bad at organizing. Significantly so. They fight amongst themselves and get caught up in drama. They spread misinformation and don’t like facts that conflict with what they believe is right. So these kinds of movements stagnate unless someone with a specific type of charisma gives them a direction to follow.
The sheep needs a good daddy shepherd, the issue we haven’t had a good daddy and the last we had, got killed by the ruling class.
So we haven’t had a pedon friendly daddy since then. He won’t ever happen again IMHO
Only viable option is decentralized direct action and hope others act in the same to create pressure on the money changers
We would if it would make a difference.
For the same reason the EU is doing anything at all: those companies are american.
You can bet your ass if those were europeans you would see the opposite happening. See: tiktok.
I don’t think so. The reverse is even happening as there are way more restrictions inside Europe for Europeans companies. The result is that they are less competitive, but more respectful for EU citizens (but unfortunately, outside companies don’t always have to respect this, for now).
That’s the obvious political side effect of the european stance in this, I still think there’s no magical difference between the US and Europe and the more blatant evident differentiator is that they are not tanking their own economies by regulating Meta’s data gathering.
You can also spin the other way around: America doesn’t do the obvious right thing because of the pressure the corporations can put on the legislators.
I agree 🙂 There’s also a lot of lobbying inside EU, but there’s more citizens resistance (for now…). As we say about capitalism: privatize profits, share losses.
It is the same thing with that landlord software that colludes rent prices instead of competes rent prices.
The free market competition has been replaced.
Ah yes we can’t have a command economy because it is too complex, but we can build a marketing dossier on every single human being.
“Why pay for more Internet than you need to? Introducing MyPlan! Internet bills are getting out of control these days! And with tariff pricing looming in the near future, we understand how many folks need to curb their spending a bit to make ends meet. MyPlan only charges you for the Internet you use–and not for all that extra bandwidth you’re wasting month after month. Call one of our service representatives today!”
A plan like this would actually work if it were capped at the same price as an unlimited plan.
It never is though. Once I was lucky enough to exploit 1TB from a $70/month 5GB plan back in the days that my ISP didn’t offer anything competitive. I ran that hustle for years.
Sadly, I think the flat rate (which is inevitable) would be way more than what we want to pay. Then paying for the internet we use… So frickin expensive 😔 Great idea otherwise. It’d be awesome. We never use what we’re paying for… But it’s the minimum.
Still ain’t buying their shit. I grow veggies and buy from Chinese market.
How are you accessing the fediverse?
From affordable municipal internet that’s treated like a utility in my jurisdiction.
Just kidding, sometimes I say the craziest things.
That’s good direct action but let’s not pretend like it does more than it really does.
But yeah solid action IMHO
Prices are not static. Learn basic economics. Poor people paying poor prices is not bad thing.
Ya got that backwards. The Poor Pay More is a real thing and a documentary movie title if you’d like to enlighten yourself.
And this is a prime example of when idiots talk out of their ass
