San Francisco: Reject Industry Defense of Surveillance Pricing
San Francisco: Don't Fall for Industry Defense of Surveillance Pricing
I urge the San Francisco Board of Supervisors to support A.B. 2654, which bans surveillance pricing where companies charge different prices based on personal data. Despite pressure from the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce, this practice exploits privacy to maximize profits, often harming vulnerable consumers. We must reject industry defenses and ensure privacy remains a human right rather than a currency for corporate gain.
Privacy is a human right, not something that people should understand as a currency to give away or protect based on how it will impact the price of groceries.
- bobbiechen
I had an interesting conversation with an coworker recently -
If you give an agent a budget of $500 to buy a flight, and the airline knows this and bumps your price to $499 even though it will offer the same flight at $300 to someone else, is there harm done? I argued it feels unjust. He said it's totally fair, it's within budget so what's the problem?
Naturally this trends towards a sort of principal-agent problem where the airline is incentivized to bribe your agent for up to $198 to max out your budget (which is a problem if you're not running your own agent).
But for general personalized pricing, there is the same dynamic to posture that you have a limited budget so that companies offer you better prices (regardless of whether you really do or not). This is haggling culture at scale.
I worry about a world trending towards this sort of thing and away from clearly universal prices and wrote about this at the beginning of the year: https://digitalseams.com/blog/the-behavioral-cost-of-persona...)
- dynm
Like most people, surveillance pricing feels gross to me. But I think we need to separate two things: Surveillance pricing is a combination of (a) price discrimination and (b) surveillance.
If it were up to me, I'd probably give people much stronger legal rights to control their personal information, which would in turn decrease "surveillance".
But I haven't seen a convincing argument to ban price discrimination. There seems to be some kind of implicit assumption that price discrimination reduces consumer surplus on average. But I've never seen a convincing argument to that effect.
For example: Pharmaceuticals are often priced much low in poor countries. That's price discrimination. (You could think of it as a primitive form of surveillance pricing.) But if that were banned, pharmaceutical companies wouldn't lower prices for everyone. That would destroy almost all their revenue which comes from high prices in rich countries. Instead, they'd charge rich-country prices to everyone, and most people in poor countries would simply have to go without. That seems like it would be pure harm.
It's entirely possible that some kind of "coarse" price discrimination is OK/good but "fine-grained" price discrimination is bad. But where's the argument?
- zzo38computer
Possibly, to add the anti-discrimination law, one of the other things that is protected against discrimination would be the computers (including kind of computers and lack of computers). Then, they cannot expect you to have a app to get a discount.
Additionally, in situations where it would be reasonable, to publish the catalogs including prices and to allow them to be distributed. (My idea of a computer payment file, additionally requires that the catalog file have a proof of work field.)
- tavavex
To me it's insane how popular surveillance pricing is in discussions on HN. I think that so far it is the pinnacle of useless rent-seeking from the tech-finance alliance. Bit by bit eliminating the 'inefficiency' of people not giving companies the last few cents they have remaining. Evil.
At first I was quick to assume that the proponents of these schemes work in adtech, data harvesting and processing companies, or are just extremely rich and poised to become the beneficiaries of all the surveillance. But so many people are bringing up things like regional pricing for poor countries, coupons or other types of discount that it makes me feel like they think this will benefit them. Are we really about to fall for the 'if you just let us track you, you will be rewarded!' scheme all over again? Did we forget when credit scores were promised to provide anything positive to the customers, but instead became exclusively a way to punish the worst offenders? You don't get anything from a good credit score anymore. Or what about letting your car insurance company track your movements under the promise of discounts which quickly turned into the promise of a lack of a punitive rate hike if you drive well?
Giving you a good deal is not profitable. Whatever mind tricks you think you'll be able to play under a surveillance pricing regime will not work. They will always be three steps ahead of you.
- benced
I suspect part of the reason this is playing well on this website is banning surveillance pricing is great for rich people. I don't have the time or inclination to coupon or aggressively cross-shop but I benefit a lot from the less well-off folks who do. The grocery store, without any ability to differentiate, has to assume that I might be one of those people and sell me a banana at the same price.