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FTC: Companies Are Using Your Data for Individualized 'Surveillance Pricing' (www.pcmag.com)

submitted 1 day ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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.

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[–] [email protected] 21 points 21 hours ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 hours ago* (last edited 8 hours ago)

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"