FTC sticks a probe into 'surveillance pricing' Big Biz uses to gouge us all The US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has launched an investigation into "surveillance pricing," a phenomenon likely familiar to anyone who's had to buy something in an incognito browser window to avoid paying a premium. Surveillance pricing, according to the FTC, is the use of algorithms, AI, and other technologies - most …
This is a clear effort by the corrupt Biden administration to crush the independent will of dynamic, job-creating businessmen and do away with America's entrepreneurial spirit! By investigating these companies, the out-of-touch liberal elites in the Biden FTC are showing that they don't understand the true will of the American people! This is the thin end of the wedge! The camel's nose in the tent! A slippery slope to Sodom and Gomorrah! Next thing you know, jackbooted Antifa thugs will be hauling off billionaires and throwing them in gulags just like in Soviet West Germany!
I think it's great that the FTC is opening this investigation. As a US citizen, I absolutely want federal regulators keeping a close eye on corporations in this manner, and I wish they would do it more. I'm just getting a little shade-throwing done at a certain sort of commentard for my own amusement.
Well, obviously you were trolling, with the requisite icon. My issue is, (aside to the complete irrelevance of your post to the topic, trolling or not) is that some people apparently vehemently believe that sort of crap. And wantonly spouting it at the start of a thread, even in jest, just poisons the whole thread. Kind of like mentioning the B-word on this side of the pond.
Because political leaders say such crazy things now that it is almost impossible to say something so crazy it is obvious sarcasm.
But he did use the correct icon, so even though it would be believable someone might say those things he clearly indicated his intent. I guess some people missed that.
Do you *know* they do this, or why do you think so? Because it’s very much not-obvious how that would be in Amazons interest.
Remember, Amazons relationship with their third party sellers is adversarial, and not aligned. Amazon want to sell as much pure revenue as possible, because they make their money on a fraction of selling price. Whereas their vendors need to actually pay wholesale for the goods, so they need to get margin. Result: it’s an endless battle where Amazon play tricks to get their vendor to sell at or below cost. Amazon still make money while their seller loses money.
Typically this results in a cut-throat race to the bottom. Amazon try to hound everyone not selling at cost out of business, because there’s always another sucker prepared to “sell at rock bottom prices to grow their Amazon”. Have you not noticed that few of the “third party stores” still exist a year later?
If there’s an incentive for Amazon to raise prices per se, I’m curious what it is.
Amazon do have an incentive for something quite different though. They make a lot of money selling the “Buy Box” position to sellers. So yes, “promoted items” will often be priced above market rate. But that’s very different from hiding lower-priced items for price-insensitive buyers.
I KNOW they alter prices depending on who is looking. I've seen different prices for the same thing show up at the same time depending on what account is used.
I can take a link that will open in my browser with one price, paste it into a remote session at a client across town, and see a different price. It doesn't happen with every product, but it absolutely DOES happen.
I think that’s orders of magnitude less blatant manipulative behaviour than say an airline cookie jacking the price up when you return looking for a flight. It’s not many prices and out of sight because you just didn’t rummage enough.
Esp. With Airlines already opaque surge pricing that is the exact opposite of supply and demand - where economies of scale do not operate.
Turkeys and alcohol get cheaper for Thanksgiving/Christmas, not more expensive.
Or as happened to my wife some years ago when booking a short flight with a previously unused airline, she took the trouble actually to read the Ts and Cs and by the time she had finished the session had timed out and she had to go back and start the booking process all over again. Only to find that the ticket price had gone up (by about 10% IIRC) even though it wasn't a heavily booked flight and plenty of seats left. I believe there were seats empty when the plane actually took off too, so not really demand pricing just, something.
.
Back in the Jurassic when I was at a trade show they had the then new EINK shelf labels.
The guy explained that the main justification was that the price could be changed dynamically. For example when the supermarket down the road closes, all the prices in the 7-11 rise. Or if a punter walks in who looks like he can pay more, or is drunk and won't notice, the prices go up.
A decade later I was in a 7-11 type store one evening, and noticed the prices updating, so it has come to pass.
Lately I have noticed that petrol price is wildly unstable, one brand of petrol stations are changing the price multiple times a day in a pretty random walk fashion. I assume this is a confusopoly, where they try to make it so you just can't know what the market price actually is, and thus subvert price competition.
Business is just steadily becoming more toxic and more customer hostile.
Here near Potsdam in Germany, fuel prices are extremely volatile and can change ten cents/litre or more in the course of a day. However, the fuel stations are required to publish their prices online within a few minutes of them changing, so of course there are comparison sites which can provide a handy graph of current prices in your area - which show certain trends. Rush hours are expensive, ten o'clock Friday or Saturday night much cheaper (as a rule).
We have locally a major crossroads with filling stations on three of the four corners, and a fourth filling station at the next crossing a couple of hundred metres away. Curiously, the three usually track with in a couple of cents of each other and within a few minutes of each other, while the singleton is usually a couple of cents cheaper.
i.e. differing prices observed at the same time on two different PC's for a Ticket for the same journey, particularly when one of the PC's has repeatedly been looking at the same journey multiple times over the course of the day.
There's a lot to suggest that some of the browser APIs need looking at... there is absolutely no reason why my browser should advertise my previous visits or other searches to commercial enterprises. Information that is individually apparently innocuous but which can be glued together to fingerprint me is unnecessarily distributed to all and sundry.
I don't know how much of this currently exists, but I'd argue that tabs should be sandboxed from each other; all cookies (except whitelisted) should be cleared on leaving a page; and third party (and many first party) scripts should be blocked.
You could start with removing or disabling the "Referrer" function, in Firefox that's quite easy to do.
The problem is, however, that the whole device reporting including window size, OS, CPU type and all the crud your browser transmits (some of it needed for the service to adapt to yoru screensize) acts as a fingerprint in itself. Most people I know don't resize their browser windows between visits, for instance..
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
