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.

  • dwindling7373
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    2 hours 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.

    • dbkblk@lemmy.world
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      2 hours 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).

      • dwindling7373
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        28 minutes 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.