Comment by ndriscoll

I think our world models are just completely different here: I would say that "legitimate" companies are usually trying to completely trick their customers. e.g. price discrimination, shrinkflation, planned obsolescence, subscription or financing models to obscure costs, surreptitiously collecting and selling their customers' information, abusing psychology to create demand for things that no thinking person should want (e.g. junk food ads, or cigarette ads before they were banned), the list goes on.

Even with the most straightforward to compare products like bank accounts, the biggest household names absolutely screw their customers. e.g. Chase gives like 0.01% APY on their savings accounts, or 0.02% on their "premier savings accounts". Capital One just settled a lawsuit for having two almost completely identical "high yield" accounts where the only difference was the less informed set of customers got like 0.3% in their "high yield" account while everyone else including Capital One's other, otherwise identical account was giving over 4%. It's not quite fraud, but I'd call that a scam from a major company. Part of the lawsuit alleged that they excluded existing customers with the worse account from ad campaigns about the better one. You can't do that without profiles on everyone, and that's exactly the sort of thing where even for products from the same company, they will absolutely use information about you to advertise to you the worst deal they think you'll take.