post text
Picture this:
- You type on Google “laptop won’t turn on”
- Google now knows you have a broken laptop and can estimate how desperate you are to fix it.
- Because it knows how desperate you are, it can increase shop prices proportionally.
You are going to pay the maximum they get you to pay.
That’s algorithmic pricing.
The more companies know about you, the more they can predict and sell how desperate you are to other stores out there.
An internet-connected car knows much more about you than you realize. A smart TV also knows what you like. Your Alexa knows if there is a problem in the home.
Privacy is much more than just sensitive data.
It’s about not giving leverage away.
Because algorithms will use it against you.
Be safe out there.
Here’s the one that convinced my dad that connecting everything is bad:
Your smart fridge knows what’s inside and knows you just added a 12 pack of soda and donuts to the shopping list. They sell that data to a bunch of companies, including your insurance company. They know you have diabetes.
Your insurance rates just went up for the fifth time this year because your insurance company knows what you’re eating.
And it’s a good thing you don’t drink beer or your car insurance would have gone up ‘due to increased risk factors.’ too bad you wanted to buy a new car this year.
Not only can you not afford it now, the price went up because they know you want a car. I’m sure they would make a payment deal with you though.
And every company will know all about the deal, the beer, the donuts, and all it took was sending money to whatever company had the information, and they were more than happy to sell it.
The more we allow companies to freely operate like this without regulation and without proper punishment for breaking the rules, we will continue sliding toward the hellscape of Ferenginar. For the non trekkies, it’s a hyper-capitalist species of profit-driven assholes.
The best thing is these companies will say it’s not violation of your privacy because they sell the data without a direct link to your name or address. But guess what? They bundle it with all kinds of other identifiers like age, sex, weight, approximate location, whatever else you give them. The insurance company then takes that and modifies the category that is specifically this age bracket, approximate location, weight, age, beer and donuts in the fridge. And surprise! You fit all these “anonymous” identifiers.
But no harm done, your identity is safe 👍
That’s the whole thing about browser fingerprinting too. Take the set of internet users who have a particular version of a particular operating system, a particular version of a particular browser, having a particular set of typefaces installed, having a particular language preference, and you’ll find yourself in the intersection of all of them.
when google gave away those google assistant spheres some years ago for free, i ordered one just to have one less of those fucking things out in the world. it went straight in the trash
I hope you also advised to only use cash. When you use a credit card, not only does Kroger or Walmart know your dietary habits, but many merchants share level 2 transaction data with your credit card company, so they know individual items in your receipt as well.
I was surprised by a recent, popular comment here on lemmy where someone advised against using cash because of missing out on rewards. A majority of people don’t appreciate the tradeoffs here. By default, banks and private companies have more info on us than we have on ourselves. To think that they’re going to do anything that benefits us more than them is naive. While not everything is zero sum, we are talking about extractive, profit seeking industries.
Cash seems like the best defense on this front. I recent switched back to cash, and continue to track my own finances; Bank sees $500 withdrawal; I see $34.45 at grocery store, $19.20 at hardware store, etc.
Pro tip: try random but memorable phone numbers at checkout. Now you can enjoy the savings, and salt/contaminate the data extraction of others. The more randomness (where and when you shop, what you buy, which numbers you use) the better.
And the health apps know when you’re sleeping, they know your heartrate throughout the day, your o2 sats. They can take all this mortality risk data to factor in things, advertise drugs to you, advertise foods they know you’ll eat even though it’s bad, manipulate how your insurance pays out for your next treatment because it would have been preventable if you hadn’t eaten those donuts. The phone manufacturers know you run apps, how long, what you do (yes, even Apple, especially Apple, they hide behind “privacy” so you feel ok with what they do to you) what web pages you open, how long you view them.
They could biometrically paint a picture of your day, your movement, there’s an entire profile of data available on many humans. I wouldn’t be surprised if they aren’t already tying heart rate data to viewership of media and advertising.
This only sounds bad for people with a love of beer and donuts.
Admittedly, I am included within that group. But if I wasn’t, I could see supporting such variable rates.
People can’t keep sacrificing what they like just to survive. There’s no point if you don’t get to live
Protip: Before buying a laptop, google “homeless shelters in Detroit”.
Even better: get homeless; log in from shelter WiFi. Actually from experience, it doesn’t matter. You are a consumer. Being homeless doesn’t exclude you from the marketplace. I got a free “obamaphone” while in a shelter. That shit is infested with popups.
In a past life I wrote the software that did this.
It’s not just about charging more when you’re desperate. It’s also things like charging you less to keep you addicted, or getting you hooked. Exploiting your emotions and behaviour to make it effective. A small loss on you now could be a long time gain for them.
Some more scenarios:
- you’ve decided to quit alcohol. Your social media accounts are used to identify you’re looking for advice. They advertise more, and send you heavy, heavy discounts a few days in to keep you on the wagon.
- Your cars insurance tracker has picked up your erratic driving. Your phone has tracked more forceful interactions, your works email provider has revealed you’ve been in a minimum of three meetings all day; You’re having a shit, stressful, day. They can’t give you discounts on your cigarettes but they do know they can get you to buy two packs instead of one by serving you ads that suggest stock levels are low. You buy two and chain smoke all day, your daily average goes from 0.5 to 0.7 packs a day.
- You go to a chain restaurant often. They know they can get you to buy more in the long run if they increase the volume you eat gradually. Every visit they goad you into buying more. Didn’t do it last time? Steeper discounts next time. Until one day you buy the extra side. That’s now your new baseline. A few weeks of that and back onto the stair climb. A little by little. You’re spending more and more.
- you’re on holiday. everyone knows you’re not coming back anytime soon so they charge full price. But move to a new city? Everyone has discounts for you to get you in the door.
The data available back then was pretty minimal, effectively only the data we generated. But it was still enough to prey on your lizard brain. With data brokerage I’ve got no idea what level of evils we could have done.
Thanks for ‘coming out’ about it. Without doxing yourself too heavily, would you mind to share more about the industry in particular or measurement of these practises? Dip you know if it was common (and when was this?)
I know for sure that we can’t trust companies to act in our best interests (if anything, its a hostile relationship), but I guess I’m curious about your inside perspective. Has that jaded you much at all?
Social/Mobile games. So an already predatory industry. Let’s get people addicted to a game, and then suck as much money from them as possible.
In the industry, we definitely weren’t the only ones doing it. And really we were only doing basic stuff (it was all in house developed middleware, so effort vs reward didn’t make much sense to go hard) I wouldn’t be surprised if others were going deep.
- the hardest part is getting someone to part with their money. But once they’ve done it once, even for the smallest amount, the second purchase will be easier.
- conversions that stopped playing got emails with discounts.
- whales got freebies when they lost to keep them happy.
- everything else was just finding the customers perfect price.
- ultimately we were selling noting. So any sale is better than no sale. You can’t make a loss on a number in a database.
Everything was broken down into campaigns (we’d have multiple running at any one time) targeting different segments. Then we’d track the conversion, sale, and retention numbers of those campaigns against each other. Sometimes one campaign might flop for one segment but not another, so we’d retarget with a new one.
I don’t think it’s used much in other markets. I know Twilio has Segment, that could be used to do segmented pricing but I’ve never really seen it done in other industries.
I wouldn’t say it’s jaded me. It has made me conscious of my data footprint. I don’t play mobile or f2p games. But I am weary. The COVID greed-flation showed the mindset of businesses. It might not be long until targeted pricing becomes worthwhile to make number go up (still), and hidden under the guise of “lowering prices”.
Okay so fast-forward ten two more years beyond that (it doesn’t matter how much - all of this is already in the past anyway:-P): virtually everyone (from your area) has an internet presence. But for you, all “they” see is a tiny stream of encrypted traffic to servers outside of your home country. Or maybe a large stream, whatever - are you downloading child pornography perhaps? Or are you a terrorist, trying to evade detection by the “legitimate” establishment, who is simply trying to “help” you to set the price for fixing your laptop?
Bam, they charge you the maximum amount for the repair anyway, then tack on a fee for the extra effort involved in having to investigate you further, making the final price double what it would have been. And this happens for every single item you buy, plus you cannot get a job b/c you don’t have a FacedInLinkThread account. The best sheeples get the best pricing structures…
This isn’t something that individuals can fight easily, without a rather extreme amount of effort involved. Hence we should fight it together.
Fast food joints already offer lower prices in their apps than at the drive through. You pay the difference through all the data they harvest.
Yes I have an order ready for a “None-ya”, is there a “None-ya” here? Is anyone here named “None-ya bidness”?
It’s a damnable choice, that’s for sure. Let them see literally everything that you do - in the sense of every single app that you have installed on that same machine - or else pay the extra price. Ngl, depending on how often I visit each place, I’ve gone both ways on this. Also, rather than recall a unique password for every site that is accessible from your mobile and potentially synched with a desktop, if you log in using a Play/Google or App/Apple account, then they have that link too - it’s just so convenient though!
It used to be email addresses. Now that still happens, but the ratchet has moved up to include phones. This is why I refuse to put banking apps onto any mobile devices - they are not “computers”, nor are they “yours”, most often even when rooted & with the OS replaced, b/c of the corruption that Google has introduced into the core Android OS.
But… what else can we do, other than choose which manner of payment we will offer the wolves? Even if that is only in terms of our efforts, time, and attention spans (and possibly the cost of a 2nd phone or at least SIM:-P) - they manage to define so many of our actions even if only in the negative sense of what we rail against. That part is inevitable, so the only question remaining is how much do we give in.
I think something got lost in translation, this isn’t literally about google raising your prices but about dynamic pricing + corporations having all your data. Google is just for the example.
Can you please explain what you read it as? Are you saying it was literal and that Dell/HP/Lenovo are raising their prices immediately from the data Google obtained by you searching for a computer repair? I was under the impression it was just an example of how info can be exploited like the person you replied to. It seems like it would lose more sales than gain if that were real, as all vendors and resellers would have to raise across the board. Like Amazon couldn’t all the sudden be cheaper than you, or they’d take your sale from the manufacturers website