Certain companies, like Priceline, advertise a scenario in which you’ll pay less for the same hotel room than the dude next to you, but a new article in Business Insider India shows more often than you even know, you’re the other guy.
Critics call it “surveillance pricing,” and what it boils down to is the same tech that sends you ads for jeans when you look some up, can determine how much you’re willing to spend on something.
And, if you’re willing to spend more than the next guy, that’s the price you’ll be offered.
The test prep company The Princeton Review, for example, was found charging customers with zip codes in predominantly Asian areas more for their services.
Projecting this outward, because your cellphone knows everything about you, from your location to your purchase history — and merchants know everything about your cellphone — they know when your phone’s about to die, and you really need that rideshare.
Lina Khan, chairwoman of the Federal Trade Commission, tells the website Jacobin, ” … through the enormous amount of behavioral and individualized data that these data brokers and other firms have been collecting, we’re now in an environment that technologically it actually is much more possible to be serving every individual person an individual price based on everything they know about you.”
Zephyr Teachout helped write anti-price-gouging rules, pushing for transparency in pricing. He explains to the website, “I think public pricing is foundational to economic liberty. Now we need to lock it down with rules.”