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.

  • Boddhisatva@lemmy.world
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    9 hours 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.

    • merc@sh.itjust.works
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      7 hours ago

      Plus, the US effectively has no public broadcaster, so all news is for-profit news owned by massive corporations. Some news sources (like the Washington Post) are literally owned directly by the oligarchs. That means that what appears on the news is largely the stuff that’s designed to keep people watching – stuff that’s sensational, talking heads arguing about things in a way that gets the viewer angry, etc. Public broadcasters in other English speaking countries (ABC, BBC, CBC, and the like) often tackle important but somewhat boring news items because they take their duty seriously. That just doesn’t happen in the US. In addition, because news is billionaire or corp-owned, stuff that might threaten corporations or billionaires (or often stuff that might displease advertisers) simply never makes the news.

      In addition, most Americans get nearly 100% of their news/entertainment from American sources, so they never see coverage of American issues from outside the US. They have no perspective on how things could be different. They might have heard a vague rumour that in Europe people don’t pay directly for healthcare, but they don’t really understand what that system is like, or what it might mean for their lives. That’s why it so easy to lie to them about how awful socialized medicine is, for example.

      I can guarantee that more than 95% of Americans have no clue what the GDPR is, even though nearly 100% have encountered the GDPR-required cookie banner multiple times. They probably find it annoying but have no idea why it exists, or why it’s an unfortunate side effect of a very good law.

      The other major problem is that due to money in politics and gerrymandering, it’s virtually impossible for Americans to influence their government. If you live in Arkansas and are a non-Republican or in Massachusetts and are a non-Democrat your vote effectively doesn’t matter, especially in the presidential campaigns, but also in just day-to-day races. In many cases, the only vote that matters is the primary, because whoever wins the Republican / Democratic primary is essentially guaranteed to win the election. Primaries are even less democratic than regular elections.

      Importantly, there are only 2 political parties that matter, and both of them like this system. It is so much easier to raise money when there’s only 1 other option. It’s so much easier to retain power when there’s only one other option.

      So, you can’t get Americans to put pressure on their governments because they don’t know that things could be different, and because they know that it’s hopeless to try to get the government to enact any policy that doesn’t benefit the wealthy donors.