The way I see it, pricing for market demand is fine, pricing for individual demand is not, particularly when the pricing is blind to the user.

It's already a bit strange when I'm on a plane and know the person sitting next to me paid 1/2 what I did, and they're aggressively stealing the arm-rest.

It's different when the airline says "we know you were looking for a flight on this day and time because you checked twice before buying a ticket, so each time you checked, we increased the price, because we figured you were more likely to buy.

This example has nothing to do with the market, it's strictly targeting me as an individual.

I had an experience with Uber where I cut myself and had to get stitches, so put my destination as a local hospital. Instant 3x surge pricing, but what am I going to do, bleed out? I got in the car and the driver said "I was about to switch off because it's been completely dead all night." It was immediately obvious to me that Uber would go "oh, you need to go to the hospital, you'll pay more", preying on the need.

surveillance pricing is such a bleak future.

pull up to a fuel pump, price boxes above the individual fuel hoses say “To learn pricing, for your convenience, please scan your phone’s NFC chip so we can determine your personal income and economy-wide purchase history.”

“Oh, it looks like you’re in the mor17-36-97wcmyoal-93 pricing group!”

“However, our scan indicates there are 2 other individuals in your automobile. To ensure an accurate pricing model, for your convenience please scan person1 and person2 mobile NFC chips.”

“Oh, we see passenger number 3 is in raf79-93-18hswcpfu—32 pricing. Thank you!

“Unfortunately, we’re unable to determine passenger 2’s income and economy-wide purchase history due to their lack of NFC ID. For your convenience please see teller inside for pricing options.”

“If you question the validity of our estimations, please send a certified postal letter to our headquarters with the price ids previously shown on screen during the passenger scans. (The postal mailing address can be conveniently received by request from welovecustomers@fuelUSA.com Please allow 6-8 weeks for processing and we’ll get that postal address to you in a timely manner.)

just let me fuel my car… please…

onto the grocery store we go… “Please open our convenient app and scan the item for pricing.” … “This app requires the permissions…”

and just for the record, since some or our tech monarchs fail to tell the difference, this is dystopian, bad. not good. this is not a “neat future.” even if we throw some neon music on top, it’s still horrifying.

Potentially a scourge, but there is one area where such a pricing scheme makes sense: fines. Charging wealthy people the same as a poor person for a traffic violation, for example, is arguable justice. The fine is not a deterrent for the wealthy, and it is potentially life-changing for the poor person, as if they don't pay they will get a warrant and jail time. The legislators who set fine levels have some image of "average person" in mind when they do so; this simple approach is quickly invalidated when wealth distribution changes from normal to power-law.

Odd Lots (an excellent Bloomberg podcast) recently did a great episode on this topic: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/audio/2024-06-03/odd-lots-how...

Lina Khan's FTC continues to look where attention is warranted. I'm not sure there's anything necessarily bad going on here, or presumably there's some bad/some good, but it's definitely something that regulators should be paying close attention to. Tech + data enables totally new and very opaque pricing schemes.

Some form of this (without AI) has been practiced in the past. How does one get around this?

Remote hosted disposable web browser instance and add items to non logged in cart then login once you see the prices so the offline cart is merged to your account?

Does anyone know a reliable method?

This is excellent; surveillance pricing means the death of a competitive free market.

Imagine if your airline knew precisely how badly you needed to be at your destination and knew your $ net worth. Flying to your father’s funeral? That’ll be 20k. Flying for cancer treatment? 30k.

Somewhat ironic that the GDPR pop-up lets me know that my information will be shared with up to 797 partners.

Are you the kind of person who reads articles against airline pricing? That means you're probably not a loyal customer and therefore we'll charge you extra.

It's about time the FTC took a closer look at surveillance pricing. The idea that companies could tailor prices based on personal data feels like something out of a dystopian novel. Does anyone else think this could lead to even more distrust in tech companies? Or is this a necessary step to keep up with the times? Either way, I'm curious to see how this plays out and what kind of regulations might come from it.