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The FTC is cracking down on companies that charge you a "personalized price" (www.techspot.com)
submitted 2 months ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 3 points 2 months ago (3 children)

Disclosure is how you kill stuff like this. Who's going to patronize a store they know is charging them double what the next guy in line pays? This is 'murica, only poor people who can't afford to get to the discount stores are supposed to be overpaying.

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  • [–] 6 points 2 months ago (2 children)

    I think unfortunately that overestimates the amount of information and discernment shoppers exercise, versus doorbuster/marketed deals and brand loyalty. Going back to net neutrality, "disclosure" just meant that fine print would be used to disclose, along with false "benefits" like saying you get "free" Netflix data on your cell plan, to sell it as a feature.

    When you are online, as well, you will have no idea what anyone else is paying. The retailer will completely control the information environment unless consumers put forth an unrealistic, disproportionate amount of time to compare prices.

    Disclosure is not how you kill stuff like this, it's how opposition to this dies.

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  • [–] 4 points 2 months ago (1 child)

    unless consumers put forth an unrealistic, disproportionate amount of time to compare prices.

    It kind of shocks me that services like camel camel camel didn't get more popular over the past 20 years. They've been out there, they're not hard to use, but it seems like people would rather blunder through life uninformed than take a minute to research before acting. This applies at retail, and the voting booth.

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  • [–] 6 points 2 months ago*

    Yes, agreed and exactly - and now Amazon's "price history" AI button helps Amazon keep shoppers from using independent (more reliable) tools.

    I think what makes this worse is that Camel Camel Camel may not be able to even function in a surveillance pricing world. It requires an objective same-price basis, and once surveillance pricing algorithmically re-prices for each shopper, a single-point third party can no longer track the price reliably for everyone.

    Then the reason why surveillance price tracking is so unrealistic is because shoppers would need to actively submit and refresh their pricing for any comparison site to be valid, and that just isn't going to happen.

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