The best solution is a constitutional amendment that actually enshrines a right to privacy. Among other things, the retention, aggregation, correlation of any personal data should be illegal (including for commercial purposes). (Storage on behalf of users in encrypted form could be made OK. Could also be refined to support retention of data of the medical, legal, etc kind with the attendant non-admissibility protections.)
This would fix this issue, it would destroy the surveillance models of Google/Facebook, and it would fix the Flock issue, etc. It would also fix the Roe v Wade issue: women would be able to get abortions in the first couple months of pregnancy without the possibility of harassment, since law enforcement would have no capacity to detect pregnancy until then.
Would it? The 1st is a prohibition on the rights of government, not private parties. Would the new amendment apply to the government, or to private sector, or to individuals? In any case, the 1st and the 28th? would continually be butting heads, since the 1st prohibits congress from passing laws that would enforce the 28th (and by extension, the states via the 14th). Would a newspaper be allowed to publish unflattering personal, privacy violating details? Would you be allowed to put up a political flyer alleging the same? I'm not sure an amendment is _the best solution_.
We already have laws that abridge the freedom of speech, so it's not absolute.
What's special about slander that we can have a say "you're not allowed to make defamatory false statements about people," but we couldn't have "you're not allowed to spy on people and sell information about them"?
Granted slander is a civil and not criminal matter, but if I could sue companies for sharing personal information about me that would still be something.
> Would the new amendment apply to the government, or to private sector, or to individuals?
It depends on how it's written, but there are no inherent limits here. You can make it do either.
> In any case, the 1st and the 28th? would continually be butting heads, since the 1st prohibits congress from passing laws that would enforce the 28th
Amendments, by definition, amend the constitution, as it was prior to them (meaning with all the previous amendments applied) so a later amendment can always override an older one explicitly, and even if it doesn't do so, the plain intent of the new amendment would likely suffice.
The fun part about amendments you can write that into the amendement and it can say whatever you want. There is no special expceptions, it defines what legal government and persons actions are by definition. The only problem (good thing imo) is it takes 2/3 to approve it which is a mountain of opposition. Complex Amendements suffer immensely from this since they have much more power than laws congress passes. But honestly privacy could probably be ensired easier with a law from congress. It is a right but perhaps starting with a law would actually be easier than an amendment nothing stops the government currently from have laws about privacy if there is an objection the escape hatch could be granted by an amendment
id see a limitation on the government to limit or remove liability for private entities to invade privacy.
private corps could still invade privacy, but they wouldnt be able to shrug the liability from torts related to their bad activity.
eg. the government can not remove liability to any behaviour that breaks the constitution, as thats the government brraking the constitution by deputizing somebody else to break it
I suggest that the new amendment make it illegal for devices to track us.
Cameras, microphones, computers, robots, algorithms, etc would not be able track people. Those are in-animate objects, not people, and shouldn't have any rights, especially the right to intrude on people's privacy.
Individuals would not be able to leverage such devices for power, influence or other selfish raesons.
Only another person, a real human, can watch you in public. Even take notes on you. Like a doctor. Or the employees of a grocery store.
You can have privacy and an institution can collect data.
HIPAA is an example of that.
All personal data should be treated with at or near HIPAA levels of security. If I give my personal information to my bank, or google, that's fine for them to look at it, but it's not ok if that information magically lands in the hands of Coca Cola for marketing.
> This is simply untenable. Institutions of all kinds have been keeping records connected to individuals for millennia.
This is the reason privacy is needed.
> Try to run a school when you can’t maintain data on the students.
Yes, we should try this. Zero-knowledge proofs and other modern technology allows for this. Even the first step of not selling or using student data for commerce is an easy step.
Those who think that we should not try to improve because our privacy is already compromised, should step aside.
There are a lot of commenters responding to this that appear to be confused about the Constitution and government power in the US.
The federal government has the power to regulate the conduct of private actors and to regulate the activity between private actors. The Civil Rights Act is an obvious example.
Relevant to this discussion, obviously HIPAA regulates how certain private actors must treat the data of other private actors, aka patients.
It's probably confusing because the first ten amendments to the Constitution, known as the Bill of Rights, primarily restrain government power. These were enacted because people believed that the original articles granted the federal government too much power. Amendments alter the existing document. Just like the articles in the original document, an amendment can also authorize government powers.
The 13th amendment is a clear example of an amendment that authorizes government power and restrains the conduct of private citizens. It abolished slavery and gave Congress the power to enforce the prohibition.
An amendment can absolutely be written to establish a right to privacy against other private actors and authorize Congress to enact regulation to enforce that right.
And even if you prefer to view the constitution as primarily setting up restrictions on government power, I think most of us here would agree that the at-scale data collection and surveillance our government performs under the guise of national security is an incredible power that is new and novel enough to warrant a discussion on keeping it in check.
The federal government a) saves everything, b) is constantly trying to attack encryption, c) tries to insert backdoors in hardware, and d) otherwise gives itself the means to spy on citizens and aliens alike. Even though we fight and have won, it’s been pyrrhic. I’m tired of constantly having the battle every time a new generation forgets why privacy is important.
I can’t imagine ways in which an amendment asserting every citizen’s innate ownership over their digital footprint, data sovereignty, etc. could be a misuse of the constitution. “No government shall abridge access to secure and private communication technology. No government shall collect or persist a profile of any citizen except as required to serve justice. No government can compel decryption of private data. Etc…”
This is impossible is you consider the financial sector - any kind of unsecured private lending like mortgages become dead in the water, fraud detection goes out the window, money laundering, etc.
It's not impossible. It just raises risk and thus borrowing rates to compensate. That has a dragging effect on the economy and brings up an important question: Are there rights we're willing to give up for money? For a lot of people, perhaps yourself the answer is yes. For others there's no price on their rights - they're not for sale.
Good points, but there should be partial solutions. For example, you can present data about the consumer in order to decide on the mortgage, but once the transaction is complete, the data should disappear. You need something akin to "the data can be used only for the particular purpose of the transaction at hand, and the data must be wholly necessary for the transaction at hand."
We also know that mortgage lenders use irrelevant---well, scratch that---protected data to make decisions (i.e. discriminatory). Race for example is not supposed to be used in lending decisions.
Fraud detection can probably be solved by other reasonable means. And in any case, if you take the fraud argument to the limit, then you'd end up advocating for constant surveillance to prevent fraud. Equifax, Experian, and Transunion are all horrible companies who do their ostensible job minimally well, while maximizing the exploitation of the data of the people.
> The best solution is a constitutional amendment that actually enshrines a right to privacy.
This seems like a category error on two fronts. First, the constitution is a law which applies to the government, not to private entities such as stores. The proper way to restrain behavior of private entities is with a regular law. Second, we already have a right to privacy under the US constitution (amendment 9 says that rights not enumerated in the constitution are still valid rights, and amendment 10 says that they are reserved to the people).
Moreover, as others have said, you really don't want to use the constitution as your method of first resort when solving societal problems. It's hard to change (by design), and you don't want to have unintended consequences baked in at that level. Sometimes an amendment is necessary, but that needs to be used very sparingly.
The constitution applies to government, yes. But it's predicated on an enumeration of inalienable human rights that need to be recognized and defended. That's what makes our government different from other instances of government. The enumeration of rights sets the stage for what we value as a society. And privacy is sorely missing from the modern dialog.
I'm sympathetic to the idea that the right to privacy in the digital age is fundamental enough that it needs to be distinguished in our founding documents and elevated to a level on par with the freedom of expression in more than just case law. Most importantly, the government shouldn't be able to spy on citizens either. Right now it does. This has implications for encryption law too.
The point of an amendment is to establish the axioms upon which we evaluate all future laws. From there we can build a legal framework that applies similar ideas to the private sector, as and where appropriate.
Your solution is so efficient and workable that I highly doubt we will ever be able to implement it. Any future has to be something we can arrive at from where we are today, and since your future involves a few large corporations dropping their hands on fistfuls of cash, it's going to be really hard to get to it.
It would also return tech to something only the wealthy can afford, and the poor get scraps.
The advertising model is socialist utopian business model, where everyone gets the same service, for the same cost, with money being no barrier to entry. Kids in Indian slums are watching the same Youtube as Moms watching 105" OLED TVs in the Hampton's. Hell that mom might even be watching that kids video, which Google happily hosts and promotes for them. All for the cost of being shown detergent and car ads.
People take the internet for granted, and treat ads as some invasive species commandeered by mega corps to extract money from the communal nature of the modern web.
The alternative though is not the current internet sans ads, the alternative is paywalls on everything, and only the rich kid having a Google, Meta, Discord, and Reddit account.
Ads suck, but at least make an effort to see the whole picture.
Well, no, its the law that contains the educational parallel to the privacy and rights of record access parts (but not the rest) of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) of 1996.
Aside from the wrong acronym, the privacy and access rights are the central focus of FERPA, but pretty far down the list for HIPAA, despite being what many people think it is centrally about—which is why both “rights” and “privacy” are in the name of FERPA but (despite the joke about the common error in the acronym that “the second P in HIPAA is for Privacy”) neither is in the name of HIPAA.
one only needs to open a history book to see that this country used to be much, much more corrupt. while this country has problems, we are far from the first generation to face them.
Cool thought but until violating the said constitution actually has enforceable consequences it’s not more than a paper tiger.
Take for instance the 2nd amendment. It is constantly under siege by government officials, both elected and appointed, as well as an activist judicial. Thankfully the SCOTUS has been somewhat successful in parlaying these incursions but someday the perpetrators will succeed, and I think mainly because there are no consequences for trying.
> until violating the said constitution actually has enforceable consequences it’s not more than a paper tiger. [...] Take for instance the 2nd amendment.
That seems like an exceptionally tepid constitutional violation to pick, after the last several years of massively-worse and flagrant violations.
Are you offering it because you think it represents something typical, and current events will prove to be an extreme outlier?
> The gun lobby’s interpretation of the Second Amendment is one of the greatest pieces of fraud, I repeat the work fraud, on the American people by special interest groups that I have seen in my lifetime. The real purpose of the Second Amendment was to ensure that state armies—the militia—would be maintained for the defense of the state. The very language of the Second Amendment refutes any argument that it was intended to guarantee every citizen an unfettered right to any kind of weapon he or she desires.
Sounds like you have been a victim of fraud. At least according to a former Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court. To prevent more people falling prey to fraudsters, Justice Stevens recommends that this amendment should be repealed - https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/27/opinion/john-paul-stevens...
Why is this limited to groceries? I don't want to pay a different price than others for any category of item, not just groceries.
Should gyms be able to charge me more based on my weight? Should airlines charge me more because they know I need to travel urgently? Should pharmacies charge me more for medication because they know I have a chronic condition? Should an online retailer charge me more because my browsing history suggests I'm willing to pay a premium? Should insurance companies charge me more because they know I'm unlikely to shop around?
you already do pay a price difference for many categories of items, insurance is a big one... where you live, how old you are, gender, etc
it used to be the norm with health insurance until the ACA dropped discrimination for chronic conditions
airlines charge more if you're too large to fit your seat
online retailers very often charge people more, there are hundreds of factors now... but one funny case was mac users getting redirected to more expensive hotels by travel sites
car insurers will raise premiums for people who haven't switched recently, I had to switch every 6 months for a couple years until one of them just stopped hiking prices around renewal
dynamic pricing is very very prevalent, but doing it on food (like health insurance before it) is particularly egregious
> airlines charge more if you're too large to fit your seat
I don't think this is a good example, because you're literally using more of the product that's being sold. I get where you're coming from but this one doesn't seem to really reinforce the point you are trying to make. It's like selling by weight or something if you wanted to compare it to groceries.
There is charging more because your costs are higher (most of your examples), then there is charging more because of opportunism. Insurance is customized because the costs are higher. That's fine.
Taking advantage of your personal circumstances that is unrelated to cost to charge you more--especially when it is hidden from you--is what is bad and should be illegal.
If I'm selling to the wealthiest zip code, where the median house price is over $10M, should I be disallowed to charge higher prices? (Not for selling a house, but selling ordinary stuff to them).
If I'm posting something for sale on Craigslist, and I don't put a price, is it OK if I quote different prices to different people who text me?
If you take charging higher grocery prices for richer people to its furthest point, you could end up with a system where every item costs Y% of their assets and the utility of a dollar is reduced the more you have. In effect, this would eliminate the relative value of having more money. For example, eggs could be priced at 0.02% of total assets, which means a poorer person with $2000 pays 40 cents, and a richer person with $1M pays $200.
Now, would this go to its furthest point? Probably not, but it has the same, but smaller, effect of reducing the utility of money for richer people.
In some scenarios, this actually might make sense. For example, in Finland, they use the day fine system where traffic ticket fines are based on the violator's daily disposable income. It's useful because this is a scenario where you want the punishment to feel equivalent to all income levels.
For groceries, I don't think this should apply, because I think we would not want the act of purchasing food to equally punish all levels of wealth.
This really becomes a philosophical discussion of defining price gouging and immoral market techniques. Some are clearly gouging, such as charging 2x plane fares for someone who has to fly to a funeral, or tripling the price of supplies after a natural disaster. Some are less clear.
> If I'm selling to the wealthiest zip code, where the median house price is over $10M, should I be disallowed to charge higher prices?
I think so, because perhaps your costs to distribute those products is more too. But what I don't think you should be able to do is say, well your house was $50mm and your house was $1mm so you pay much more. Or you're wearing Air Force Ones so maybe your price is just a little more wink wink. It's a bit like hyper-targeted advertising versus general advertising.
> If I'm posting something for sale on Craigslist, and I don't put a price, is it OK if I quote different prices to different people who text me?
I think so as well. I don't see a problem with this - you don't know anything (maybe besides a green/blue text) anything about the buyer, how much they make, &c.
Not comparable. The markets can still charge wherever they want, but it needs to be priced per item and not per customer. In your house counterexample, you could set whatever list price you want.
How can price discovery work if everyone’s price is different? What downward pressure would even exist on surveillance-derived prices besides resale black markets? Societally, do we really want to further monetize the expansion of the mass surveillance state?
> If I'm selling to the wealthiest zip code, where the median house price is over $10M, should I be disallowed to charge higher prices?
Yes, you should be disallowed. Otherwise every online store will upcharge you based on IP. There can be exceptions for small businesses or individuals, but that's it.
> The bill also permits a vast array of discounting practices while requiring increased transparency around discounts and placing some limitations on how consumers can be profiled.
The issue isn't "hey, you gave me a custom price that was disadvantageous". The issue is that "you gave me the regular price for some item but gave discounts to other people". That's trickier to outlaw because the "bad price" is the regular price, not a special discounted price.
If businesses are behaving badly, what they're doing is setting high regular prices and then discounting items that they don't think you'd otherwise buy. For items that you buy all the time, they're giving you minimal or no discounts.
But if you tell them they can't do this profiling, then they'll presumably resort to some mix of (1) no discounts with slightly lower overall pricing or (2) some loss leaders but otherwise regular pricing.
It's not especially clear to me that in the long run this is much better for consumers. They might get slightly more consumer surplus, but I doubt it will make that much of a difference. People in a given area probably have fairly similar buying patterns, plus they can still use loyalty programs, student/senior discounts/etc., as well as traditional coupons, to let customers sort themselves into "I'm generally price conscious" and "my time is worth more than my money".
It can never be better for consumers. The only way a business would adopt this practice is if it leads to greater revenues. On average, that necessarily means worse prices for the average consumer.
> But if you tell them they can't do this profiling, then they'll presumably resort to some mix of (1) no discounts with slightly lower overall pricing or (2) some loss leaders but otherwise regular pricing.
That's not true. Competition with other market participants should in theory (assuming competition) be sufficient. The firms are in general already charging the profit-maximizing price. They could, however, increase profits with more information.
But there is the additional problem that they will also monetize this information by selling it into advertising markets. The whole point of this business model is to capture previously uncaptured value that would otherwise have been shared in the commons.
> It can never be better for consumers. The only way a business would adopt this practice is if it leads to greater revenues. On average, that necessarily means worse prices for the average consumer.
That depends on the distribution of consumer incomes. Price discrimination (charging people more who can afford more) can be good for low-income customers.
>It can never be better for consumers. The only way a business would adopt this practice is if it leads to greater revenues. On average, that necessarily means worse prices for the average consumer.
Not necessarily. Look at airlines for example, which make heavy use of price discrimination. This allows them to offer a lower economy price to people who have less money, while subsidizing the flight by charging a higher price to business or luxury travelers.
If they were only allowed to offer one type of ticket at one price, it would mostly benefit richer passengers while pricing the poorest passengers out of air travel.
I think a better solution would be to force retailers to submit accurate pricing information to price comparison aggregators preferably in real-time straight from their inventory system, and give consumers easy access to live price comparison data. If everyone knew how much your retailer is screwing with you, surveillance economy would cease to exist.
For example, Safeway (and the rest of the Albertsons stores) offer coupons that are only available online. You use them in person in the store, via the loyalty card, but you have to use their website or app to get them. Some of these get offered to everyone, but others are personalized based on whatever data they have on you.
Kroger's delivery service wasn't that bad at all, it was fantastic actually.
Of course, some things are too good to be true, they apparently lost hundreds of millions of dollars on the effort before closing it down earlier this year. At least they did in my area in January, my understanding is they ended it everywhere they didn't have a physical store presence.
I buy "pickup" orders online all the time through the store's app where you can also buy instacart delivery. It's still shopping online but there's no additional cost nor tip for ordering pickup.
Is that assuming Instacart/DoorDash? Click and collect or even delivery from grocery stores isn't nearly that bad, right? I thought it was pretty competitive.
For a lot of people their time and their effort is worth more to them than their money unless it is something they particularly enjoy doing themselves.
I don’t know how people stand it when it comes to produce. The people picking the orders aren’t being paid enough to give a shit about the state of your zucchini or whatever so it’s random that you end up with a decent one.
Then again, a lot of people just don’t eat fresh food.
Many grocery stories were also experimenting with digital signage that is dynamic as well. So many not individually profiled but at level of hours/neighborhood. They are trying to bring it where they can.
In this bill it just lists grocery stores as one of the examples where this practice could be banned, I wonder if it would apply to other more general online storefronts such as amazon.
Because I'm a bit lazy/busy, is there a summary that covers things like shopper cards/discount cards/membership requirements, and if this allows businesses to find different means of escape from the rules.
True story #1: whenever we go on vacation, wife and I check rates for Uber and Lyft on both of our phones, and consistently we get different rates up to 15% delta.
True story #2: I am eyeing a nice Seiko watch on Amazon, the price has been oscillating between $296 and $316. Whatever, thinking about waiting for black friday. Then the other day the price jumped to $350; weird.
So, I switched to Firefox, used the VPN to a different US location, checked the watch and the very same watch was $316. It was surreal.
Looking forward to hack it in a way that favors consumers.
Does anyone know how authority on passing these kinds of rules go, and if they are enforceable?
Is there some state/federal law that delegates power over some things to the municipalities/cities/counties etc that allow them passing ordnance like this?
It feels weird to me that this would not be a state / federal level decision, but maybe that's just my Finnish ass.
My understanding is that in typical Seattle fashion, this is a new legal requirement with zero funding or staffing to implement and enforce it. If you feel you have been wronged, hire an attorney and sue.
The constitution generally, at both the federal level and state levels generally has a clause like "if its not enumerated here then the next division down has the right to regulate it" hence why the feds regulate interstate commerce, but not state internal commerce. This usually stops at the county level, not the city level, but large cities are effectively their own counties so that distinction doesnt matter much.
Its enforceable in that the city has a police department and zoning rights. So they can force businesses out for violating the law, and they have they have the monopoly of violence within the city to make sure you follow their directions. But whether thats funded or practicable depends on other factors.
There are only 2 divisions in the constitution, federal and state. Everything further down is not covered. States are allowed to rule over counties and cities absolutely, and can even dissolve them entirely.
Anyway, Cory has been ringing the alarm about this for ages. He even has a blog post about a city that passed a similar law, but it has huge loopholes for big grocery to keep profit maxxing.
It's been done for decades. Supermarket coupons give price reductions to people with the time to survey, clip, organise, and use supermarket coupons. Discount codes at web checkout give price reductions to those "in the know". These are not personalised reductions, but they can be pretty precisely targeted.
I’m most concerned about data that would normally be illegal to collect or give to advertisers still making its way into their databases anyway. It would be illegal for your doctor to sell details about your health conditions to advertisers, but they may be able to infer it anyway from your purchasing or search data.
Add AI to the mix and it gets worse. An AI algorithm instructed to maximize profits may charge double for a chocolate bar to someone it inferred was diabetic, but AI is non-deterministic so it would be difficult to prove the reasoning for its decision, which would be handy for plausible deniability.
And the government being able to purchase data that it would be illegal for it to gather is a massive and glaring loophole. The actions of the Trump Administration should make it obvious to everyone how massive databases with intimate and personal details could be weaponized.
>The AI reads you and decides - nothing to be had from this hungry guy in the future and prices your last burger at 100.
...which is exactly the opposite how a rational "surveillance pricing" would work. Economics 101 would dictate you price based on willingness to pay, and if you only got $3 in your pocket, they would charge $3 (or whatever the break-even price is).
I got hit with personal pricing on amazon in Spain yesterday buying a birthday gift. If I was in privacy mode it showed as 59.99 and if I was logged in 64.99
Different fees for different products. Parking outside the stadium before a football game is a much more valuable product than parking at 1pm at the edge of town.
I think it's fine to allow it but if you're going to price things based on the individual buyer, you then should be forced to accept counter offers. Make everything negotiable.
$5.00 for a gallon of milk? No, I'll give you $2.50. Back and forth until you find a mutually agreeable price.
I have been thinking about calling the economic model that comes with this kind of shit Cancerpitalism, it's growth for growth sake, and that's the whole thing with Cancer.
This shit is way out of control, so if you are sick, then medicines are more expensive, if you want to buy a present, all your ideas are more expensive...
"Micro transactions"... Stopping your game to show you ads... Pay to win... Fcking street fighter 6 you have to buy it like 4 times to see all the characters... buy a car and then pay for heated seats, show you ads on the fricking big screen... buy a laptop everything is solder and the piece of crap comes with 4gb of ram but it's a "AI computer" because it's fcking expensive and lame because AI I guess... take your pet to the hospital and all of them are bought by "hedge funds"... a.k.a. we bought all of them so 500$ for someone to see your pet 10mins... "virtual health care" you then have to accept 10 million pages of terms of service so you can put your virtual glasses and see your "virtual band aid on your exposed fractured bone"...
F uc king Cancer
the whole idea of Capitalism is that if you are good doing something then you improve your service and that allows you to have a competitive edge... then to compete someone has to offer a better service... BUT BECAUSE WE HAVE TO GIVE MORE AND MORE AND MORE WE HAVE TO EXTRACT MORE AND MORE AND MORE FROM CUSTOMERS...
stop and think... shareholders sued united healthcare because the service "improved" after Mario Bross brother throw an effin red shell to this 'ffin guy...
Economic background: profit maximizing businesses would like to extract the most value out of every transaction. Not everyone derives the same value from the same thing. E.g., someone might be willing to pay $5 for a burger, whereas others might only pay $4. Price too high and you lose the people that will only pay (or can only afford) less. Price too low and you don't charge people as much as they would have been willing to pay and lose out on profit. The economic POV is that voluntary transactions happen because both sides benefit (or at least don't lose out) or they wouldn't happen. Therefore every voluntary transaction produces some economic benefit in the form of producer and consumer surplus. The amount of these is determined by the gap between the price and the consumer's WTP (willingness to pay, i.e., the highest price they would be willing to pay) and the price and the producer's WTA (willingness to accept, i.e., the lowest price they would accept at). Together these form the economic surplus of a transaction.
Profit maximizing businesses want to capture as much of the economic surplus of transactions as possible by optimizing the price they charge. When businesses offer a single price their ability to do so is limited because some people with a lower WTP that is still above the producers WTA don't elect to purchase and on the flip side some people who have a higher WTP would be willing to pay more and don't.
To increase their profits therefore businesses can attempt to do what's referred to as "price discrimination" which is when they offer different prices to people based on the person's perceived WTP (there are different means of doing so, such as geographically based pricing, etc.,) and when they offer exactly the customer's WTP to every unique customer it's called perfect price discrimination, because they're capturing the entire value of all transactions.
In competitive markets, businesses ability to price discriminate is reduced, but not entirely eliminated.
Now... this surveillance pricing is basically a form of price discrimination. However, the interesting part is that while price discrimination in net is beneficial for businesses, it actually can also benefit lower income/lower WTP consumers by allowing them to buy at a lower price (since they wouldn't have bought at a higher price -- both the consumer and the business benefit here) but hurts customers with a higher income/WTP since the business can charge them more.
This is interesting because this is a somewhat rare regressive (hurts lower income people more than higher income people) anti-business policy. Generally, I think most anti-business policies are also progressive (well, except for the idiotic ones like broad tariffs) but in this case banning the ability of price discrimination through personalized pricing hurts businesses and lower income people while benefiting higher income people (the surveillance aspect of it could be thought of as an externality, which hurts everyone).
If you're highly anti-surveillance you might argue that it's net positive for everyone because lower income people wouldn't be surveilled in the same way (well, at least it wouldn't be applied, I don't think it would actually change the surveillance side of things) but that requires a normative position on whether surveillance is bad.
In theory this policy could probably be made non-redistributive (benefitting higher and lower income people equally) by adding a grocery tax that would be used to offset the impact to lower income people, but in practice it seems like it would be difficult to administer (especially in Seattle, which doesn't collect city taxes from people directly today, not to mention the opportunities for arbitrage).
Yet another thing that GDPR makes harder. That law people think forces websites to display cookie banners is actually a law that requires you to gain freely given informed consent by the person whose personal data you want to process.
Whether you do that on a website, app or in a grocery store is irrelevant. Every person needs to be (1) informed about what data you are recording, (2) what you plan to do with it, (3) who else sees it and then (4) they need to say yes to all of that. Oh, and the No option needs to work equally well and you are not allowed to record any data before they say either yes or no.
That would be the law. In practise even many websites don't fulfill it.
Imagine how well that would make you look as a grocery store.
What I would say is: "I assume that people who don't put the same value on the principle of self-sufficiency that I do would support a scheme to allow people of lesser means to buy groceries on the open market at a lower price than is permitted to me."
i'm not sure why this is surprising. the socialist left, the coalition who care about equal access to good and services, is leading the charge against surveillance pricing.
> the socialist left would like nothing better than to have surveillance pricing, so long as it is deployed in the aid of poor people
nothing about this makes sense. i think you're making an argument that the socialist left wants poor people to afford more, and yes that's true. but comparing that to price gouging is where logic left the station.
You are underestimating how much they want to take from the rich to subsidize others. They want to do this so much that they just implemented an unconstitutional income tax against the rich. As long as it's only rich people getting price gauged I do not think they would lose any sleep.
The best solution is a constitutional amendment that actually enshrines a right to privacy. Among other things, the retention, aggregation, correlation of any personal data should be illegal (including for commercial purposes). (Storage on behalf of users in encrypted form could be made OK. Could also be refined to support retention of data of the medical, legal, etc kind with the attendant non-admissibility protections.)
This would fix this issue, it would destroy the surveillance models of Google/Facebook, and it would fix the Flock issue, etc. It would also fix the Roe v Wade issue: women would be able to get abortions in the first couple months of pregnancy without the possibility of harassment, since law enforcement would have no capacity to detect pregnancy until then.
Also, tech won't save us had a podcast on the dynamic pricing topic: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/how-data-is-changing-a...
Would it? The 1st is a prohibition on the rights of government, not private parties. Would the new amendment apply to the government, or to private sector, or to individuals? In any case, the 1st and the 28th? would continually be butting heads, since the 1st prohibits congress from passing laws that would enforce the 28th (and by extension, the states via the 14th). Would a newspaper be allowed to publish unflattering personal, privacy violating details? Would you be allowed to put up a political flyer alleging the same? I'm not sure an amendment is _the best solution_.
We already have laws that abridge the freedom of speech, so it's not absolute.
What's special about slander that we can have a say "you're not allowed to make defamatory false statements about people," but we couldn't have "you're not allowed to spy on people and sell information about them"?
Granted slander is a civil and not criminal matter, but if I could sue companies for sharing personal information about me that would still be something.
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> Would the new amendment apply to the government, or to private sector, or to individuals?
It depends on how it's written, but there are no inherent limits here. You can make it do either.
> In any case, the 1st and the 28th? would continually be butting heads, since the 1st prohibits congress from passing laws that would enforce the 28th
Amendments, by definition, amend the constitution, as it was prior to them (meaning with all the previous amendments applied) so a later amendment can always override an older one explicitly, and even if it doesn't do so, the plain intent of the new amendment would likely suffice.
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The fun part about amendments you can write that into the amendement and it can say whatever you want. There is no special expceptions, it defines what legal government and persons actions are by definition. The only problem (good thing imo) is it takes 2/3 to approve it which is a mountain of opposition. Complex Amendements suffer immensely from this since they have much more power than laws congress passes. But honestly privacy could probably be ensired easier with a law from congress. It is a right but perhaps starting with a law would actually be easier than an amendment nothing stops the government currently from have laws about privacy if there is an objection the escape hatch could be granted by an amendment
id see a limitation on the government to limit or remove liability for private entities to invade privacy.
private corps could still invade privacy, but they wouldnt be able to shrug the liability from torts related to their bad activity.
eg. the government can not remove liability to any behaviour that breaks the constitution, as thats the government brraking the constitution by deputizing somebody else to break it
I suggest that the new amendment make it illegal for devices to track us.
Cameras, microphones, computers, robots, algorithms, etc would not be able track people. Those are in-animate objects, not people, and shouldn't have any rights, especially the right to intrude on people's privacy.
Individuals would not be able to leverage such devices for power, influence or other selfish raesons.
Only another person, a real human, can watch you in public. Even take notes on you. Like a doctor. Or the employees of a grocery store.
This is simply untenable. Institutions of all kinds have been keeping records connected to individuals for millennia.
Try to run a school when you can’t maintain data on the students.
You can have privacy and an institution can collect data.
HIPAA is an example of that.
All personal data should be treated with at or near HIPAA levels of security. If I give my personal information to my bank, or google, that's fine for them to look at it, but it's not ok if that information magically lands in the hands of Coca Cola for marketing.
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> This is simply untenable. Institutions of all kinds have been keeping records connected to individuals for millennia.
This is the reason privacy is needed.
> Try to run a school when you can’t maintain data on the students.
Yes, we should try this. Zero-knowledge proofs and other modern technology allows for this. Even the first step of not selling or using student data for commerce is an easy step.
Those who think that we should not try to improve because our privacy is already compromised, should step aside.
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It's not - GDPR does that and it could even be much stricter still and we'd be fine.
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There are a lot of commenters responding to this that appear to be confused about the Constitution and government power in the US.
The federal government has the power to regulate the conduct of private actors and to regulate the activity between private actors. The Civil Rights Act is an obvious example.
Relevant to this discussion, obviously HIPAA regulates how certain private actors must treat the data of other private actors, aka patients.
It's probably confusing because the first ten amendments to the Constitution, known as the Bill of Rights, primarily restrain government power. These were enacted because people believed that the original articles granted the federal government too much power. Amendments alter the existing document. Just like the articles in the original document, an amendment can also authorize government powers.
The 13th amendment is a clear example of an amendment that authorizes government power and restrains the conduct of private citizens. It abolished slavery and gave Congress the power to enforce the prohibition.
An amendment can absolutely be written to establish a right to privacy against other private actors and authorize Congress to enact regulation to enforce that right.
And even if you prefer to view the constitution as primarily setting up restrictions on government power, I think most of us here would agree that the at-scale data collection and surveillance our government performs under the guise of national security is an incredible power that is new and novel enough to warrant a discussion on keeping it in check.
The federal government a) saves everything, b) is constantly trying to attack encryption, c) tries to insert backdoors in hardware, and d) otherwise gives itself the means to spy on citizens and aliens alike. Even though we fight and have won, it’s been pyrrhic. I’m tired of constantly having the battle every time a new generation forgets why privacy is important.
I can’t imagine ways in which an amendment asserting every citizen’s innate ownership over their digital footprint, data sovereignty, etc. could be a misuse of the constitution. “No government shall abridge access to secure and private communication technology. No government shall collect or persist a profile of any citizen except as required to serve justice. No government can compel decryption of private data. Etc…”
This is impossible is you consider the financial sector - any kind of unsecured private lending like mortgages become dead in the water, fraud detection goes out the window, money laundering, etc.
It's not impossible. It just raises risk and thus borrowing rates to compensate. That has a dragging effect on the economy and brings up an important question: Are there rights we're willing to give up for money? For a lot of people, perhaps yourself the answer is yes. For others there's no price on their rights - they're not for sale.
I am not convinced mortgages is a net benefit to the society in any way.
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And?
Good points, but there should be partial solutions. For example, you can present data about the consumer in order to decide on the mortgage, but once the transaction is complete, the data should disappear. You need something akin to "the data can be used only for the particular purpose of the transaction at hand, and the data must be wholly necessary for the transaction at hand."
We also know that mortgage lenders use irrelevant---well, scratch that---protected data to make decisions (i.e. discriminatory). Race for example is not supposed to be used in lending decisions.
Fraud detection can probably be solved by other reasonable means. And in any case, if you take the fraud argument to the limit, then you'd end up advocating for constant surveillance to prevent fraud. Equifax, Experian, and Transunion are all horrible companies who do their ostensible job minimally well, while maximizing the exploitation of the data of the people.
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> The best solution is a constitutional amendment that actually enshrines a right to privacy.
This seems like a category error on two fronts. First, the constitution is a law which applies to the government, not to private entities such as stores. The proper way to restrain behavior of private entities is with a regular law. Second, we already have a right to privacy under the US constitution (amendment 9 says that rights not enumerated in the constitution are still valid rights, and amendment 10 says that they are reserved to the people).
Moreover, as others have said, you really don't want to use the constitution as your method of first resort when solving societal problems. It's hard to change (by design), and you don't want to have unintended consequences baked in at that level. Sometimes an amendment is necessary, but that needs to be used very sparingly.
The constitution applies to government, yes. But it's predicated on an enumeration of inalienable human rights that need to be recognized and defended. That's what makes our government different from other instances of government. The enumeration of rights sets the stage for what we value as a society. And privacy is sorely missing from the modern dialog.
I'm sympathetic to the idea that the right to privacy in the digital age is fundamental enough that it needs to be distinguished in our founding documents and elevated to a level on par with the freedom of expression in more than just case law. Most importantly, the government shouldn't be able to spy on citizens either. Right now it does. This has implications for encryption law too.
The point of an amendment is to establish the axioms upon which we evaluate all future laws. From there we can build a legal framework that applies similar ideas to the private sector, as and where appropriate.
You should probably start with an amendment to end citizens united fist. That law is making all of this possible.
Your solution is so efficient and workable that I highly doubt we will ever be able to implement it. Any future has to be something we can arrive at from where we are today, and since your future involves a few large corporations dropping their hands on fistfuls of cash, it's going to be really hard to get to it.
The other framing of this is: how much money are you willing to sell your rights for?
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This will make the world much poorer. You might think that's worth it but it's true.
No it won't.
See? I can make unsubstantiated sweeping claims too.
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It would also return tech to something only the wealthy can afford, and the poor get scraps.
The advertising model is socialist utopian business model, where everyone gets the same service, for the same cost, with money being no barrier to entry. Kids in Indian slums are watching the same Youtube as Moms watching 105" OLED TVs in the Hampton's. Hell that mom might even be watching that kids video, which Google happily hosts and promotes for them. All for the cost of being shown detergent and car ads.
People take the internet for granted, and treat ads as some invasive species commandeered by mega corps to extract money from the communal nature of the modern web.
The alternative though is not the current internet sans ads, the alternative is paywalls on everything, and only the rich kid having a Google, Meta, Discord, and Reddit account.
Ads suck, but at least make an effort to see the whole picture.
Nothing that person said was about removing ads.
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There's plenty of other laws that limit the choices of the poor for their own good. You can't just build a lean-to slum, you can't buy swill milk.
The Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) is the educational equivalent to HIPPA.
Well, no, its the law that contains the educational parallel to the privacy and rights of record access parts (but not the rest) of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) of 1996.
Aside from the wrong acronym, the privacy and access rights are the central focus of FERPA, but pretty far down the list for HIPAA, despite being what many people think it is centrally about—which is why both “rights” and “privacy” are in the name of FERPA but (despite the joke about the common error in the acronym that “the second P in HIPAA is for Privacy”) neither is in the name of HIPAA.
But that will absolutely never happen, the country is more corrupt than it has ever been and doesn’t care one bit about citizens concerns
It's really hard to say with a straight face that the citizens are not getting precisely the government they [collectively] want.
one only needs to open a history book to see that this country used to be much, much more corrupt. while this country has problems, we are far from the first generation to face them.
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Cool thought but until violating the said constitution actually has enforceable consequences it’s not more than a paper tiger.
Take for instance the 2nd amendment. It is constantly under siege by government officials, both elected and appointed, as well as an activist judicial. Thankfully the SCOTUS has been somewhat successful in parlaying these incursions but someday the perpetrators will succeed, and I think mainly because there are no consequences for trying.
Just an example and JMHO.
> until violating the said constitution actually has enforceable consequences it’s not more than a paper tiger. [...] Take for instance the 2nd amendment.
That seems like an exceptionally tepid constitutional violation to pick, after the last several years of massively-worse and flagrant violations.
Are you offering it because you think it represents something typical, and current events will prove to be an extreme outlier?
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> The gun lobby’s interpretation of the Second Amendment is one of the greatest pieces of fraud, I repeat the work fraud, on the American people by special interest groups that I have seen in my lifetime. The real purpose of the Second Amendment was to ensure that state armies—the militia—would be maintained for the defense of the state. The very language of the Second Amendment refutes any argument that it was intended to guarantee every citizen an unfettered right to any kind of weapon he or she desires.
Sounds like you have been a victim of fraud. At least according to a former Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court. To prevent more people falling prey to fraudsters, Justice Stevens recommends that this amendment should be repealed - https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/27/opinion/john-paul-stevens...
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Once people manage to bypass the 2nd Amendment, the next one to go will be free speech.
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Why is this limited to groceries? I don't want to pay a different price than others for any category of item, not just groceries.
Should gyms be able to charge me more based on my weight? Should airlines charge me more because they know I need to travel urgently? Should pharmacies charge me more for medication because they know I have a chronic condition? Should an online retailer charge me more because my browsing history suggests I'm willing to pay a premium? Should insurance companies charge me more because they know I'm unlikely to shop around?
you already do pay a price difference for many categories of items, insurance is a big one... where you live, how old you are, gender, etc
it used to be the norm with health insurance until the ACA dropped discrimination for chronic conditions
airlines charge more if you're too large to fit your seat
online retailers very often charge people more, there are hundreds of factors now... but one funny case was mac users getting redirected to more expensive hotels by travel sites
car insurers will raise premiums for people who haven't switched recently, I had to switch every 6 months for a couple years until one of them just stopped hiking prices around renewal
dynamic pricing is very very prevalent, but doing it on food (like health insurance before it) is particularly egregious
> airlines charge more if you're too large to fit your seat
I don't think this is a good example, because you're literally using more of the product that's being sold. I get where you're coming from but this one doesn't seem to really reinforce the point you are trying to make. It's like selling by weight or something if you wanted to compare it to groceries.
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There is charging more because your costs are higher (most of your examples), then there is charging more because of opportunism. Insurance is customized because the costs are higher. That's fine.
Taking advantage of your personal circumstances that is unrelated to cost to charge you more--especially when it is hidden from you--is what is bad and should be illegal.
If I'm selling to the wealthiest zip code, where the median house price is over $10M, should I be disallowed to charge higher prices? (Not for selling a house, but selling ordinary stuff to them).
If I'm posting something for sale on Craigslist, and I don't put a price, is it OK if I quote different prices to different people who text me?
I can see arguments both ways.
If you take charging higher grocery prices for richer people to its furthest point, you could end up with a system where every item costs Y% of their assets and the utility of a dollar is reduced the more you have. In effect, this would eliminate the relative value of having more money. For example, eggs could be priced at 0.02% of total assets, which means a poorer person with $2000 pays 40 cents, and a richer person with $1M pays $200.
Now, would this go to its furthest point? Probably not, but it has the same, but smaller, effect of reducing the utility of money for richer people.
In some scenarios, this actually might make sense. For example, in Finland, they use the day fine system where traffic ticket fines are based on the violator's daily disposable income. It's useful because this is a scenario where you want the punishment to feel equivalent to all income levels.
For groceries, I don't think this should apply, because I think we would not want the act of purchasing food to equally punish all levels of wealth.
This really becomes a philosophical discussion of defining price gouging and immoral market techniques. Some are clearly gouging, such as charging 2x plane fares for someone who has to fly to a funeral, or tripling the price of supplies after a natural disaster. Some are less clear.
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> If I'm selling to the wealthiest zip code, where the median house price is over $10M, should I be disallowed to charge higher prices?
I think so, because perhaps your costs to distribute those products is more too. But what I don't think you should be able to do is say, well your house was $50mm and your house was $1mm so you pay much more. Or you're wearing Air Force Ones so maybe your price is just a little more wink wink. It's a bit like hyper-targeted advertising versus general advertising.
> If I'm posting something for sale on Craigslist, and I don't put a price, is it OK if I quote different prices to different people who text me?
I think so as well. I don't see a problem with this - you don't know anything (maybe besides a green/blue text) anything about the buyer, how much they make, &c.
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Not comparable. The markets can still charge wherever they want, but it needs to be priced per item and not per customer. In your house counterexample, you could set whatever list price you want.
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How can price discovery work if everyone’s price is different? What downward pressure would even exist on surveillance-derived prices besides resale black markets? Societally, do we really want to further monetize the expansion of the mass surveillance state?
> If I'm selling to the wealthiest zip code, where the median house price is over $10M, should I be disallowed to charge higher prices?
Yes, you should be disallowed. Otherwise every online store will upcharge you based on IP. There can be exceptions for small businesses or individuals, but that's it.
The devil is really in the details:
> The bill also permits a vast array of discounting practices while requiring increased transparency around discounts and placing some limitations on how consumers can be profiled.
The issue isn't "hey, you gave me a custom price that was disadvantageous". The issue is that "you gave me the regular price for some item but gave discounts to other people". That's trickier to outlaw because the "bad price" is the regular price, not a special discounted price.
If businesses are behaving badly, what they're doing is setting high regular prices and then discounting items that they don't think you'd otherwise buy. For items that you buy all the time, they're giving you minimal or no discounts.
But if you tell them they can't do this profiling, then they'll presumably resort to some mix of (1) no discounts with slightly lower overall pricing or (2) some loss leaders but otherwise regular pricing.
It's not especially clear to me that in the long run this is much better for consumers. They might get slightly more consumer surplus, but I doubt it will make that much of a difference. People in a given area probably have fairly similar buying patterns, plus they can still use loyalty programs, student/senior discounts/etc., as well as traditional coupons, to let customers sort themselves into "I'm generally price conscious" and "my time is worth more than my money".
It can never be better for consumers. The only way a business would adopt this practice is if it leads to greater revenues. On average, that necessarily means worse prices for the average consumer.
> But if you tell them they can't do this profiling, then they'll presumably resort to some mix of (1) no discounts with slightly lower overall pricing or (2) some loss leaders but otherwise regular pricing.
That's not true. Competition with other market participants should in theory (assuming competition) be sufficient. The firms are in general already charging the profit-maximizing price. They could, however, increase profits with more information.
But there is the additional problem that they will also monetize this information by selling it into advertising markets. The whole point of this business model is to capture previously uncaptured value that would otherwise have been shared in the commons.
> It can never be better for consumers. The only way a business would adopt this practice is if it leads to greater revenues. On average, that necessarily means worse prices for the average consumer.
That depends on the distribution of consumer incomes. Price discrimination (charging people more who can afford more) can be good for low-income customers.
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>It can never be better for consumers. The only way a business would adopt this practice is if it leads to greater revenues. On average, that necessarily means worse prices for the average consumer.
Not necessarily. Look at airlines for example, which make heavy use of price discrimination. This allows them to offer a lower economy price to people who have less money, while subsidizing the flight by charging a higher price to business or luxury travelers.
If they were only allowed to offer one type of ticket at one price, it would mostly benefit richer passengers while pricing the poorest passengers out of air travel.
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In the end this made news about how the surveillance economy works and should further freak people out about it. This helps long term I think.
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I think a better solution would be to force retailers to submit accurate pricing information to price comparison aggregators preferably in real-time straight from their inventory system, and give consumers easy access to live price comparison data. If everyone knew how much your retailer is screwing with you, surveillance economy would cease to exist.
Pretty good idea, especially if it had a business size floor.
Has buying groceries online been normalized to this extent? I still feel dirty about it, but maybe I’m too old fashioned.
For example, Safeway (and the rest of the Albertsons stores) offer coupons that are only available online. You use them in person in the store, via the loyalty card, but you have to use their website or app to get them. Some of these get offered to everyone, but others are personalized based on whatever data they have on you.
Sometimes you get coupons mailed on your behavior. There is a story out there that Target has(had?) a pregnancy prediction score, and acted on that to send you coupons: https://verdict.justia.com/2012/02/28/should-target-tell-you...
Seriously, once you realize you’re paying a minimum of 30% extra, it becomes hard to stomach.
Kroger's delivery service wasn't that bad at all, it was fantastic actually.
Of course, some things are too good to be true, they apparently lost hundreds of millions of dollars on the effort before closing it down earlier this year. At least they did in my area in January, my understanding is they ended it everywhere they didn't have a physical store presence.
I buy "pickup" orders online all the time through the store's app where you can also buy instacart delivery. It's still shopping online but there's no additional cost nor tip for ordering pickup.
Is that assuming Instacart/DoorDash? Click and collect or even delivery from grocery stores isn't nearly that bad, right? I thought it was pretty competitive.
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For a lot of people their time and their effort is worth more to them than their money unless it is something they particularly enjoy doing themselves.
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Depends on what you mean. I can buy groceries directly through the grocer instead of a middleman like DoorDash. I would count that as online.
I don’t know how people stand it when it comes to produce. The people picking the orders aren’t being paid enough to give a shit about the state of your zucchini or whatever so it’s random that you end up with a decent one.
Then again, a lot of people just don’t eat fresh food.
Many grocery stories were also experimenting with digital signage that is dynamic as well. So many not individually profiled but at level of hours/neighborhood. They are trying to bring it where they can.
A lot of grocery chains let you order online. They'll pack it for you and you simply drive there and pick up (they'll bring to your car).
I was confused about this, like they're changing prices in the store when I get near?
I hear that a lot but not sure how it would work. What if two people are standing there? How do they know what price you saw when you go to pay?
I think it only makes sense for online shoppers (and there it does make sense)
Link to the bill: https://seattle.legistar.com/LegislationDetail.aspx?ID=81665...
In this bill it just lists grocery stores as one of the examples where this practice could be banned, I wonder if it would apply to other more general online storefronts such as amazon.
Actually, why even limit what it applies to
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Because I'm a bit lazy/busy, is there a summary that covers things like shopper cards/discount cards/membership requirements, and if this allows businesses to find different means of escape from the rules.
from the bill:
> “Algorithmic-based price discrimination” does not include:
> 5. The covered retailer offers a discounted price on equal terms to one of the following groups of consumers:
> c. Members, enrollees, or participants in a loyalty, membership, including cooperative memberships, or rewards program [...]
True story #1: whenever we go on vacation, wife and I check rates for Uber and Lyft on both of our phones, and consistently we get different rates up to 15% delta.
True story #2: I am eyeing a nice Seiko watch on Amazon, the price has been oscillating between $296 and $316. Whatever, thinking about waiting for black friday. Then the other day the price jumped to $350; weird.
So, I switched to Firefox, used the VPN to a different US location, checked the watch and the very same watch was $316. It was surreal.
Looking forward to hack it in a way that favors consumers.
Seattle really doing its best to confront every single strawman argument regarding the high price of groceries other than the obvious and true ones.
Does anyone know how authority on passing these kinds of rules go, and if they are enforceable?
Is there some state/federal law that delegates power over some things to the municipalities/cities/counties etc that allow them passing ordnance like this?
It feels weird to me that this would not be a state / federal level decision, but maybe that's just my Finnish ass.
My understanding is that in typical Seattle fashion, this is a new legal requirement with zero funding or staffing to implement and enforce it. If you feel you have been wronged, hire an attorney and sue.
That's not as good as auditing the books of grocers, but it's better than permitting surveillance pricing.
The constitution generally, at both the federal level and state levels generally has a clause like "if its not enumerated here then the next division down has the right to regulate it" hence why the feds regulate interstate commerce, but not state internal commerce. This usually stops at the county level, not the city level, but large cities are effectively their own counties so that distinction doesnt matter much.
Its enforceable in that the city has a police department and zoning rights. So they can force businesses out for violating the law, and they have they have the monopoly of violence within the city to make sure you follow their directions. But whether thats funded or practicable depends on other factors.
There are only 2 divisions in the constitution, federal and state. Everything further down is not covered. States are allowed to rule over counties and cities absolutely, and can even dissolve them entirely.
CTRL+F 'Doctorow' Zero results??
Anyway, Cory has been ringing the alarm about this for ages. He even has a blog post about a city that passed a similar law, but it has huge loopholes for big grocery to keep profit maxxing.
Good overview: https://pluralistic.net/2026/07/30/pay-for-privacy/ Specific article about Maryland: https://economicpopulist.substack.com/p/gov-wes-moore-claims...
It's been done for decades. Supermarket coupons give price reductions to people with the time to survey, clip, organise, and use supermarket coupons. Discount codes at web checkout give price reductions to those "in the know". These are not personalised reductions, but they can be pretty precisely targeted.
I’m most concerned about data that would normally be illegal to collect or give to advertisers still making its way into their databases anyway. It would be illegal for your doctor to sell details about your health conditions to advertisers, but they may be able to infer it anyway from your purchasing or search data.
Add AI to the mix and it gets worse. An AI algorithm instructed to maximize profits may charge double for a chocolate bar to someone it inferred was diabetic, but AI is non-deterministic so it would be difficult to prove the reasoning for its decision, which would be handy for plausible deniability.
And the government being able to purchase data that it would be illegal for it to gather is a massive and glaring loophole. The actions of the Trump Administration should make it obvious to everyone how massive databases with intimate and personal details could be weaponized.
Why wouldn't this qualify as price discrimination? Which is already illegal.
You are broke, with no prospects and last hundred bucks in your account.
You show up at a macdonalds, hungry.
The AI reads you and decides - nothing to be had from this hungry guy in the future and prices your last burger at 100.
Excellent future.
>The AI reads you and decides - nothing to be had from this hungry guy in the future and prices your last burger at 100.
...which is exactly the opposite how a rational "surveillance pricing" would work. Economics 101 would dictate you price based on willingness to pay, and if you only got $3 in your pocket, they would charge $3 (or whatever the break-even price is).
I got hit with personal pricing on amazon in Spain yesterday buying a birthday gift. If I was in privacy mode it showed as 59.99 and if I was logged in 64.99
Will Seattle City council also implement one parking fee for all neighborhoods and times of day?
They won't implement surveillance pricing for parking fees, if that's what you meant to say.
Isn't the entire system of parking enforcement based on surveillance?
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Different fees for different products. Parking outside the stadium before a football game is a much more valuable product than parking at 1pm at the edge of town.
Everyone still pays the same price.
I think it's fine to allow it but if you're going to price things based on the individual buyer, you then should be forced to accept counter offers. Make everything negotiable.
$5.00 for a gallon of milk? No, I'll give you $2.50. Back and forth until you find a mutually agreeable price.
Ah yes, the old 3 hour grocery list negotiation. This must be the lauded efficiency the capitalists are always on about.
Kinda happens if you go to the wrong store.
No, an AI running on your phone will do it. That's how the stores are setting their prices. Fight fire with fire.
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I have been thinking about calling the economic model that comes with this kind of shit Cancerpitalism, it's growth for growth sake, and that's the whole thing with Cancer.
This shit is way out of control, so if you are sick, then medicines are more expensive, if you want to buy a present, all your ideas are more expensive...
"Micro transactions"... Stopping your game to show you ads... Pay to win... Fcking street fighter 6 you have to buy it like 4 times to see all the characters... buy a car and then pay for heated seats, show you ads on the fricking big screen... buy a laptop everything is solder and the piece of crap comes with 4gb of ram but it's a "AI computer" because it's fcking expensive and lame because AI I guess... take your pet to the hospital and all of them are bought by "hedge funds"... a.k.a. we bought all of them so 500$ for someone to see your pet 10mins... "virtual health care" you then have to accept 10 million pages of terms of service so you can put your virtual glasses and see your "virtual band aid on your exposed fractured bone"...
F uc king Cancer
the whole idea of Capitalism is that if you are good doing something then you improve your service and that allows you to have a competitive edge... then to compete someone has to offer a better service... BUT BECAUSE WE HAVE TO GIVE MORE AND MORE AND MORE WE HAVE TO EXTRACT MORE AND MORE AND MORE FROM CUSTOMERS...
stop and think... shareholders sued united healthcare because the service "improved" after Mario Bross brother throw an effin red shell to this 'ffin guy...
IT'S A HEALTHCARE NOT A LEACH MACHINE
lol it's called going to the store
Economic background: profit maximizing businesses would like to extract the most value out of every transaction. Not everyone derives the same value from the same thing. E.g., someone might be willing to pay $5 for a burger, whereas others might only pay $4. Price too high and you lose the people that will only pay (or can only afford) less. Price too low and you don't charge people as much as they would have been willing to pay and lose out on profit. The economic POV is that voluntary transactions happen because both sides benefit (or at least don't lose out) or they wouldn't happen. Therefore every voluntary transaction produces some economic benefit in the form of producer and consumer surplus. The amount of these is determined by the gap between the price and the consumer's WTP (willingness to pay, i.e., the highest price they would be willing to pay) and the price and the producer's WTA (willingness to accept, i.e., the lowest price they would accept at). Together these form the economic surplus of a transaction.
Profit maximizing businesses want to capture as much of the economic surplus of transactions as possible by optimizing the price they charge. When businesses offer a single price their ability to do so is limited because some people with a lower WTP that is still above the producers WTA don't elect to purchase and on the flip side some people who have a higher WTP would be willing to pay more and don't.
To increase their profits therefore businesses can attempt to do what's referred to as "price discrimination" which is when they offer different prices to people based on the person's perceived WTP (there are different means of doing so, such as geographically based pricing, etc.,) and when they offer exactly the customer's WTP to every unique customer it's called perfect price discrimination, because they're capturing the entire value of all transactions.
In competitive markets, businesses ability to price discriminate is reduced, but not entirely eliminated.
Now... this surveillance pricing is basically a form of price discrimination. However, the interesting part is that while price discrimination in net is beneficial for businesses, it actually can also benefit lower income/lower WTP consumers by allowing them to buy at a lower price (since they wouldn't have bought at a higher price -- both the consumer and the business benefit here) but hurts customers with a higher income/WTP since the business can charge them more.
This is interesting because this is a somewhat rare regressive (hurts lower income people more than higher income people) anti-business policy. Generally, I think most anti-business policies are also progressive (well, except for the idiotic ones like broad tariffs) but in this case banning the ability of price discrimination through personalized pricing hurts businesses and lower income people while benefiting higher income people (the surveillance aspect of it could be thought of as an externality, which hurts everyone).
If you're highly anti-surveillance you might argue that it's net positive for everyone because lower income people wouldn't be surveilled in the same way (well, at least it wouldn't be applied, I don't think it would actually change the surveillance side of things) but that requires a normative position on whether surveillance is bad.
In theory this policy could probably be made non-redistributive (benefitting higher and lower income people equally) by adding a grocery tax that would be used to offset the impact to lower income people, but in practice it seems like it would be difficult to administer (especially in Seattle, which doesn't collect city taxes from people directly today, not to mention the opportunities for arbitrage).
Yet another thing that GDPR makes harder. That law people think forces websites to display cookie banners is actually a law that requires you to gain freely given informed consent by the person whose personal data you want to process.
Whether you do that on a website, app or in a grocery store is irrelevant. Every person needs to be (1) informed about what data you are recording, (2) what you plan to do with it, (3) who else sees it and then (4) they need to say yes to all of that. Oh, and the No option needs to work equally well and you are not allowed to record any data before they say either yes or no.
That would be the law. In practise even many websites don't fulfill it.
Imagine how well that would make you look as a grocery store.
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(good thing happens)
"I assume the people I hate would support the opposite bad thing to this good thing."
I like it: a philosophical take.
What I would say is: "I assume that people who don't put the same value on the principle of self-sufficiency that I do would support a scheme to allow people of lesser means to buy groceries on the open market at a lower price than is permitted to me."
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i'm not sure why this is surprising. the socialist left, the coalition who care about equal access to good and services, is leading the charge against surveillance pricing.
> the socialist left would like nothing better than to have surveillance pricing, so long as it is deployed in the aid of poor people
nothing about this makes sense. i think you're making an argument that the socialist left wants poor people to afford more, and yes that's true. but comparing that to price gouging is where logic left the station.
>nothing about this makes sense
You are underestimating how much they want to take from the rich to subsidize others. They want to do this so much that they just implemented an unconstitutional income tax against the rich. As long as it's only rich people getting price gauged I do not think they would lose any sleep.
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