Your personal data, including your precise location, browser history, and even your mouse movements, is being used by some companies to show different prices for the same products—a phenomenon the FTC has dubbed “surveillance pricing.”

According to a new FTC report, retailers are hiring “intermediary firms” to algorithmically tweak and target their prices.

“Instead of a price or promotion being a static feature of a product, the same product could have a different price or promotion based on a variety of inputs—including consumer-related data and their behaviors and preferences, the location, time, and channels by which a consumer buys the product,” the FTC says.

  • @[email protected]
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    2 months ago

    Why don’t Americans put pressure on legislation like Europeans did with the GDPR?

    • @[email protected]
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      2 months ago

      Because they work three jobs to get food on their table and have to remortgage their house to pay for an ambulance. Privacy is a first-world problem and the US is a third-world country.

    • @[email protected]
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      162 months ago

      Because, for the last four or five decades, the wealthy in America have used assorted media to foment never ending religious, economic, and racial culture wars between different elements of the middle and lower classes. That constant state of conflict keeps the American people from ever being able to unite and accomplish anything at all.

    • @[email protected]
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      52 months ago

      Americans in aggregate simply don’t care. They don’t understand this, won’t take the time to understand it, and don’t care enough to understand.

      • @[email protected]
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        52 months ago

        Americans care but they’re bad at organizing. Significantly so. They fight amongst themselves and get caught up in drama. They spread misinformation and don’t like facts that conflict with what they believe is right. So these kinds of movements stagnate unless someone with a specific type of charisma gives them a direction to follow.

        • sunzu2
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          12 months ago

          The sheep needs a good daddy shepherd, the issue we haven’t had a good daddy and the last we had, got killed by the ruling class.

          So we haven’t had a pedon friendly daddy since then. He won’t ever happen again IMHO

          Only viable option is decentralized direct action and hope others act in the same to create pressure on the money changers

    • @[email protected]
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      02 months ago

      For the same reason the EU is doing anything at all: those companies are american.

      You can bet your ass if those were europeans you would see the opposite happening. See: tiktok.

      • @[email protected]
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        2 months ago

        I don’t think so. The reverse is even happening as there are way more restrictions inside Europe for Europeans companies. The result is that they are less competitive, but more respectful for EU citizens (but unfortunately, outside companies don’t always have to respect this, for now).

        • @[email protected]
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          12 months ago

          That’s the obvious political side effect of the european stance in this, I still think there’s no magical difference between the US and Europe and the more blatant evident differentiator is that they are not tanking their own economies by regulating Meta’s data gathering.

          You can also spin the other way around: America doesn’t do the obvious right thing because of the pressure the corporations can put on the legislators.

          • @[email protected]
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            12 months ago

            I agree 🙂 There’s also a lot of lobbying inside EU, but there’s more citizens resistance (for now…). As we say about capitalism: privatize profits, share losses.