Thank you for providing an actual, tangible downside to this. I've never really seen one before. So many articles like this end up with people coming up with scenarios like "But what if there's a dictator and he wants to round up everyone who bought a 12-pack of Charmin' last week?"

It would be interesting to see the arms race that could arise, though. If individualized prices became enough of a thing, there would probably be personal shoppers who would buy things for you at a lower price with their "poor person" data profile and pocket a percentage of the difference. Or more likely, there will probably be a way to run a browser with the right cookies to give you the lowest price.

If you want a really evil example, consider a version of Android Auto which knows when you’re low on fuel and auctions your “nearby fuel stations” search result slots to the highest bidders, in exchange for which the bidders get notified that they can jack up their prices on you.

This is already happening.

Uber is making you pay more when your phone is low on battery (because they know you don't have too much time to think about how you're getting back home).

Airline companies are showing you higher prices if they believe you can afford it, from the information they're getting about you (like your user agent).

> Uber is making you pay more

Do you have a source? 9news[0] claims otherwise.

> Airline companies are showing you higher prices

I do not find evidence of this, either[1].

[0]: https://www.9news.com/article/news/verify/verify-does-uber-c...

[1]: https://hal.inria.fr/hal-01081034/document

> Airline companies are showing you higher prices if they believe you can afford it, from the information they're getting about you (like your user agent).

Is there a way to game this? i.e., given a specific user agent, can I convince airlines I'm poor and get a deal on tickets?

Disgusting

Why? In any transaction there's a non-negative spread between how much the buyer and seller value the item being exchanged. Why is it disgusting if the seller captures that spread but not if the buyer captures it, or is there some other distinction you're drawing?

Off-topic: this same idea has been cropping up a lot on HN recently with respect to salaries when moving to lower CoL areas. The argument on one side is that their work hasn't become less useful, and on the other side we hear that with a lower CoL you need the money less, and we have a bit of a holy war going on trying to describe why one side or the other has some moral claim to the entirety of that surplus.

There's an inherent information and therefore power imbalance as well as general unethical nature of the interactions.

I understand this article. I still want to see a penny every time my data is used/accessed/sold/etc, if anything to drive up the cost of contracts around or servicing of my data. If my data is made functionally anonymous then make it a dime payment and then a penny every time that block of data is used sold. Send it as a check to my mailing address with a letter including the legal entities involved, initial source of the data, what type or category of data they have relating to me (like PII category ex address, name, purchase history, etc), their intended use for the data (research vs marketing), and how I can contact to have my data removed from the set. Also if my data is made anonymous, provide a 1 penny check and above information for any use or sale of the data set.

Yes this regulation would kill the industry in overhead costs aimed at making the information somewhat close to the 'informed consent' required for medical approvals and breaking down how the industry works. Maybe make it so on initial sale and usage you get a check then at the start of each following year that entity pays out for annual usage.

Our data is valuable collectively to identify trends, markets, and opportunity and I'd like to know how I'm manipulated into being a part of that as well as what entities I cannot trust with any personal data. And I think this should apply to Experian/etc too. Chase wants to find out my credit score to market CC reward offers to me? Make it known and pay me the same way farms are paid for the useful manure their animals produce.

The problem is with the information inbalance. Before, a salesman, for example would look at what kind of clothing you were wearing and what segment items you're looking for.

Now let's do a little thought-experiment with the Uber ride and look at the information you and Uber have to make your price and choice on:

For Uber:

- What time is it? +

- Are you far away from home? +

- Have you been here before? -

- What have you paid before? +

- Where do you shop usually? +

- Are you rich? ++

- Are you ill? +

- Are you pregnant? +

- Are you drunk? ++

- Are you very drunk? +++ (bonus!)

- Are you sad? +

- Did you just break up? ++

- Do you have any friends? +/-

- Do you have any friends with cars? -

- Are you alone? +

- Are you going home? +

- Are you already home? -

- probably a lot more...

For you:

- Price?

- How screwed am I if I don't take the ride?

There are not many other options. Maybe a taxi's while they last and Lyft probably has the same algorithm.

With machine learning, the model isn't even a set of explicitly selected factor whose parameters are then derived from data, but hidden factors (and interactions) within the neural net. The engineers who construct the models don't even knnoe how they achieve their ressults, only that they do.

Upside? Plausible deniability! An NN AI that happens to score based on age, gender, gender preference, religion, disability status, and ethnicity, but buried among other factors and not explicitly exposed? Perfectly fine! (At least until you can hire stats PhDs to prove statistically significant bias.)

Bad news? The engineers have no idea why (or when) the model gives bad results. It's answers without insight.

Is the problem then that they have that information, and having that information is inherently bad for some reason regardless of the effects, or is it that with that information they're able to reliably capture more of the market surplus and cause more of your transactions to only be barely worth it for you?

The buyer is a person. Their needs should be satisfied as much as possible, that's the whole point of having an economy.

The seller is a company. Its only purpose is to satisfy its customers' needs.

Except this same thing has been happening in all of history. Salesmen asking different prices from different people through negotiations. I don't see it being necessarily a bad thing.

But in real life examples, the exact opposite has been playing out.

Instead of you being sold to the richest, hungriest gas station, it's more like all of the gas stations racing to the lowest price to serve you, and consumers having no brand relationships with gas stations anymore.

If Android auto was always serving up expensive gas, users would start using bing or apple maps - I certainly would if there was such a tangible cost difference

How many people would do so, though? How many non-technical people are capable of untangling themselves from Google’s services? How many non-technical people are even aware that “Google” isn’t the only search engine?

I learnt about Waze many years ago from non technical folks. Drivers have niche communities of their own too, where stuff like this gets disseminated.

“Waze is better than google maps for directions” for a long time was true. Then google bought it.

If Waze can rise up, so can another. Especially where it’ll save drivers some % on their fuel bills. Even more so in European countries with high fuel duties.

>[..]Then google bought it.[..]

And that will happen to every competitor on that market.

For non-technical people I would say it is much easier. Use another service that offers email, calendar and contacts (Germany is full of them) - done. For storage it's a little more complicated. Other than that, what do regular people use? Search? I've seen just as many use bing or what have you.

That's not the situation in the town where i live. There's less tax here compared to the city, gas prices should be lower, instead, every gas station in town is priced higher and all keep the same high price.

Years ago, the grocery stores here did the same thing. It's taken 15 years for them to finally begin to actually compete with each other...well just prior to covid anyway...

This is pretty standard due to transport + location costs, isn't it? Gas is close to cheapest in city suburbs.

>there would probably be personal shoppers who would buy things for you at a lower price with their "poor person" data profile and pocket a percentage of the difference

See...there's always someone that can come up with an even more awful scenario.

I'd never even thought of such a thing...but that really doesn't sound too far fetched.

I guess it would create a new little economy, but i dunno, these things always remind me of something from black mirror.

And most of the depictions of the future in that show kinda horrified me.

How about "bombarding someone with articles about how voting doesn't matter if their spending pattern matches that of a particular demographic"?

gaslighting as a service: https://www.thespinner.net/

Isn't price discrimination like this illegal in the US? I know it's illegal in the EU for sure.

> I don't need my own personal omnipotent digital god dictating everything in my life. Even if it saves me a few bucks.

You can opt-out/not opt-in all you want, but as long as enough people opt-in (or don't opt-out), they can just apply an existing model against you, get good-enough results and you're almost as screwed.

> Sure, until that information is used to give individualized prices and other things. Or used to hide things or show you only things the algorithms decide you like....or should have according to them.

If anything, prices would rise for richer people, and decline for poorer people.

Is that bad?

Perhaps, but if/when word got out that this was occurring, an arbitrage opportunity would be available. Unless it were only a very marginal amount cheaper that would not cover the cost of arbitrage.

I got news for you, this already happens all the time, without nominally different pricing, just pricing for different SKUs. The arbitrage is realized by producers.

Yeah. And the rich don’t mind, because status signaling is a a thing.

I don't think it's that simple. Often it would be the reverse because the richer people have more options of other places to buy.

It's much easier to do that for hotels than for groceries since comparison is harder. It will be quite widely known and sightly abused if your grocery chain starts doing that. The shops will always have the reference price in public after all.

The pricing difference that actually matters (moving old stock) is already mostly done without personalised data. Sales are a standard.

For now, with brick and mortor businesses because it's hard to do that in a physical place. With people increasingly ordering things online it becomes easier and more profitable to do that.

If someone has your spending history, sees you buy something frequently, they have no incentive to put it on sale. Likewise, if they see something you've maybe looked at but not bought, they can put it in sale and tempt you.

This is just one example. I'm sure marketers can come up with all sorts.

Great insight - thanks