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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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[–] 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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