[HN Gopher] FTC launches probe into 'surveillance pricing'
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FTC launches probe into 'surveillance pricing'
Author : m463
Score : 94 points
Date : 2024-07-24 02:39 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.cnbc.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.cnbc.com)
| SoullessSilent wrote:
| Some form of this (without AI) has been practiced in the past.
| How does one get around this?
|
| Remote hosted disposable web browser instance and add items to
| non logged in cart then login once you see the prices so the
| offline cart is merged to your account?
|
| Does anyone know a reliable method?
| sadboi31 wrote:
| No because the pricing is based on the perception of actual
| person/distinct (lived) personality. It's hard to capture these
| things in a purely headless way. You need to feed realistic
| sensor(wifi/bt/mic) data + location data (gps + wifi) to get
| accurate ads.
|
| Without doing anything illegal and without broadcasting your
| intent on trying to espouse something criminal maybe pretend to
| have an affair (and encourage others to pretend to do the same
| or similar).
|
| Separate communication apps on disposable visa, different
| google playstore account, different phone number, etc#. Trust
| that wifi+bluetooth+cellular proximity will link the phones
| together.
|
| After a few weeks-months that second phone should be the
| similar enough to their actual profile for you to setup a
| remote residential proxy (w/ effective split tunnelling setup)
| for other people to funnel unique but similar requests through.
| fragmede wrote:
| It's also depends on where you come from. The price if you go
| to the airline's website directly may not match what you'd
| get off you come in via http://flights.google.com or
| http://expedia.com or http://kayak.com or whomever.
| llamaimperative wrote:
| Odd Lots (an excellent Bloomberg podcast) recently did a great
| episode on this topic:
| https://www.bloomberg.com/news/audio/2024-06-03/odd-lots-how...
|
| Lina Khan's FTC continues to look where attention is warranted.
| I'm not sure there's anything necessarily bad going on here, or
| presumably there's some bad/some good, but it's definitely
| something that regulators should be paying close attention to.
| Tech + data enables totally new and very opaque pricing schemes.
| datavirtue wrote:
| Outlaw it so you don't regulatory resources. This is about
| companies dynamically setting (increasing) prices based on the
| demographics of the user. This is anti-market activity.
| trod123 wrote:
| At its core, it is price fixing, and already technically
| illegal.
|
| There is no sound argument that can be made that weights in
| AI software programed in don't have biases created by
| human's, and won't ever engage in illegal activity. They are
| just trying to make the argument, its not illegal because an
| AI does it.
|
| We have already seen how Amazon uses their bait and switch
| algorithms (dynamic pricing) and there is more to learn about
| with regards to Project Nessy.
|
| It is anti-consumer activity, which can only occur in
| concentrated business sectors (oligopoly/monopoly).
| fuzzfactor wrote:
| >At its core, it is price fixing
|
| Sounds more like price variation to me.
|
| >It is anti-consumer activity
|
| Roger, maybe even worse.
| ryandrake wrote:
| I think OP means "price gouging" rather than fixing. Or,
| if you're a libertarian and want a positive spin,
| "increasing prices to exactly what the market will bear".
| pessimizer wrote:
| > At its core, it is price fixing, and already technically
| illegal.
|
| In what way? Price fixing is when competitors agree not to
| compete.
| llamaimperative wrote:
| You don't think e.g. a barber shop should be allowed to offer
| discounted haircuts to homeless folks? Weird case but a real
| one, and is why "just outlaw it" is not often a good
| solution.
| jasonlotito wrote:
| Marketed Price: $20 versus Homeless Price: $0
|
| Decreasing. Okay.
|
| Marketed Price: $20 versus Price Gouging based on a
| specific individual: $100
|
| Increasing. Not Okay.
|
| You don't know e.g. the difference between decreasing and
| increasing? Weird but a real issue, and is why education is
| important.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| This seems to make sense in your head but I fail to see
| this argument. Increase/decrease seems to be something
| you're deciding on in your head.
|
| Marketed price for billionaires: $1000 Middle America
| discount price: $20 Price for you: $100 because you're
| not a billionaire but richer than middle America.
| datavirtue wrote:
| You are way off base. The issue is with hiding information.
| It's fine if the white iPerson knows a black man with an
| android is getting a different price. I think the
| philosophy you are falling back on is that you offer
| something for a price, person pays price if they find
| value.
|
| Turning the market against the consumer using a machine is
| outright dystopia.
|
| The theoretical market that we are all striving for is one
| where all actors have as much information as possible.
| Profit garnered from information assymetry is waste, waste
| creates problems and ultimately slows economic growth.
|
| Or we can just keep playing: "I got mine, fuck you."
| cyanydeez wrote:
| Im guessinh a handful of these pricing plans do price things
| after intent, and do so to increase profits.
|
| Most of the economic system needs a throttle between minutes
| and dayd to prevent fuckery that comes with technowizardy.
| bitcurious wrote:
| This is excellent; surveillance pricing means the death of a
| competitive free market.
|
| Imagine if your airline knew precisely how badly you needed to be
| at your destination and knew your $ net worth. Flying to your
| father's funeral? That'll be 20k. Flying for cancer treatment?
| 30k.
| fragmede wrote:
| United used to offer a discount for bereavement or medical
| emergency flights but they stopped doing that in 2015.
| wesselbindt wrote:
| While I agree with you completely that this is absolutely
| undesirable, I don't see the relation to competition.
| Competition between airline carriers still exists no? Delta
| might charge 20k, and United might charge you 19k or whatever.
| Seems like competitive market to me. Shitty sure, but shitty
| and competitive are not mutually exclusive.
| pedalpete wrote:
| The way I see it, pricing for market demand is fine, pricing for
| individual demand is not, particularly when the pricing is blind
| to the user.
|
| It's already a bit strange when I'm on a plane and know the
| person sitting next to me paid 1/2 what I did, and they're
| aggressively stealing the arm-rest.
|
| It's different when the airline says "we know you were looking
| for a flight on this day and time because you checked twice
| before buying a ticket, so each time you checked, we increased
| the price, because we figured you were more likely to buy.
|
| This example has nothing to do with the market, it's strictly
| targeting me as an individual.
|
| I had an experience with Uber where I cut myself and had to get
| stitches, so put my destination as a local hospital. Instant 3x
| surge pricing, but what am I going to do, bleed out? I got in the
| car and the driver said "I was about to switch off because it's
| been completely dead all night." It was immediately obvious to me
| that Uber would go "oh, you need to go to the hospital, you'll
| pay more", preying on the need.
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