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.
A plan like this would actually work if it were capped at the same price as an unlimited plan.
It never is though. Once I was lucky enough to exploit 1TB from a $70/month 5GB plan back in the days that my ISP didn’t offer anything competitive. I ran that hustle for years.