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.
This feels to me like “we know this user will typically spend the asking price rather than wait for a discount, so they will always get full price offers” or “according to cookies and other data this user also browses high end products elsewhere so we will offer inflated prices or higher ‘shipping’ costs and they will never question it”