> The bill also permits a vast array of discounting practices while requiring increased transparency around discounts and placing some limitations on how consumers can be profiled.
The issue isn't "hey, you gave me a custom price that was disadvantageous". The issue is that "you gave me the regular price for some item but gave discounts to other people". That's trickier to outlaw because the "bad price" is the regular price, not a special discounted price.
If businesses are behaving badly, what they're doing is setting high regular prices and then discounting items that they don't think you'd otherwise buy. For items that you buy all the time, they're giving you minimal or no discounts.
But if you tell them they can't do this profiling, then they'll presumably resort to some mix of (1) no discounts with slightly lower overall pricing or (2) some loss leaders but otherwise regular pricing.
It's not especially clear to me that in the long run this is much better for consumers. They might get slightly more consumer surplus, but I doubt it will make that much of a difference. People in a given area probably have fairly similar buying patterns, plus they can still use loyalty programs, student/senior discounts/etc., as well as traditional coupons, to let customers sort themselves into "I'm generally price conscious" and "my time is worth more than my money".
> But if you tell them they can't do this profiling, then they'll presumably resort to some mix of (1) no discounts with slightly lower overall pricing or (2) some loss leaders but otherwise regular pricing.
That's not true. Competition with other market participants should in theory (assuming competition) be sufficient. The firms are in general already charging the profit-maximizing price. They could, however, increase profits with more information.
But there is the additional problem that they will also monetize this information by selling it into advertising markets. The whole point of this business model is to capture previously uncaptured value that would otherwise have been shared in the commons.
That depends on the distribution of consumer incomes. Price discrimination (charging people more who can afford more) can be good for low-income customers.
If you want redistribution, implement a wealth tax.
But in the long run, we've seen a steady worsening of the economy experience as airlines have invested in improved first class experiences. In the long run it's simply impossible for a firm to serve poor people (they have no money), absent interventions that allocate buying power to the poor person, or others that force the firm to do so.
Not necessarily. Look at airlines for example, which make heavy use of price discrimination. This allows them to offer a lower economy price to people who have less money, while subsidizing the flight by charging a higher price to business or luxury travelers.
If they were only allowed to offer one type of ticket at one price, it would mostly benefit richer passengers while pricing the poorest passengers out of air travel.
The practice that needs to be outlawed is invisible and per customer pricing. It would be the airline for the same class of seat charging different amounts because, for example, their profile of the flier shows they recently searched for "casket" and so they are likely heading to a family funeral.
It would be as if the airline for their economy class offered the flight for $1000 if you don't play, $600 to attract customers into buying, and $800 if they find their customer is desperate. All for the same seat.
You've picked an "evil" example, but what price discrimination really tends to look like is charging richer people more.
Prices are generally lowered for poor people because they'd rather have your $300 than have an empty seat. If you don't have $800, no amount of desperation will make you pay it - you'll just miss the funeral.
I'm sold, how do we put this in the Constitution?
Airlines can't directly tell how much money a customer has, so they find indirect proxies.
Business travelers (reimbursed by their employer and thus not very price-sensitive) have identifiable patterns. They prefer particular flights on particular days of the week, tend to buy tickets close to date of travel, etc. Airlines exploit this to charge them higher prices.
I do, however, object to firms aggregating any individual's purchases across different interactions. That data should belong solely to the individual and it should be illegal to retain enough information to aggregate interactions across interactions with the same customer.
It's not great they track purchasing, but if it's not linked to me I don't really care that much.
Should gyms be able to charge me more based on my weight? Should airlines charge me more because they know I need to travel urgently? Should pharmacies charge me more for medication because they know I have a chronic condition? Should an online retailer charge me more because my browsing history suggests I'm willing to pay a premium? Should insurance companies charge me more because they know I'm unlikely to shop around?
If I'm posting something for sale on Craigslist, and I don't put a price, is it OK if I quote different prices to different people who text me?
I can see arguments both ways.
I think so, because perhaps your costs to distribute those products is more too. But what I don't think you should be able to do is say, well your house was $50mm and your house was $1mm so you pay much more. Or you're wearing Air Force Ones so maybe your price is just a little more wink wink. It's a bit like hyper-targeted advertising versus general advertising.
> If I'm posting something for sale on Craigslist, and I don't put a price, is it OK if I quote different prices to different people who text me?
I think so as well. I don't see a problem with this - you don't know anything (maybe besides a green/blue text) anything about the buyer, how much they make, &c.
Going with the Craigslist scenario, what if I do? What if I quote different prices depending on the area code of their phone number? So I quote higher prices for people with a California number?
I'm not asking about morality or ethics. Does it make sense to make this scenario (Craigslist ad) illegal?
Equating "an individual selling on craigslist prices based on area code" with "Albertsons buys petabytes of individual private data and prices groceries based on income" is IMO not valid. Yes the very very core -borderline philosophical- question is the same. But the _scale_ is what makes it the problem.
It's the same argument I heard a few times "Why is flock a problem? My home driveway camera points at the street and sometimes I can read a license plate!"
So much like other laws / ordinances / provisions / etc. if regulation against this type of behaviors get enshrined, they should include thresholds for scale (which I believe the Seattle one does)
Substitute your logic: is it OK to change your price because the responder is from an area that is mostly black? No, it's not.
Charge one price and charge it for everyone. Anything else leads to discrimination and other awful behaviors that we've had to pass laws to change.
Yes, you should be disallowed. Otherwise every online store will upcharge you based on IP. There can be exceptions for small businesses or individuals, but that's it.
it used to be the norm with health insurance until the ACA dropped discrimination for chronic conditions
airlines charge more if you're too large to fit your seat
online retailers very often charge people more, there are hundreds of factors now... but one funny case was mac users getting redirected to more expensive hotels by travel sites
car insurers will raise premiums for people who haven't switched recently, I had to switch every 6 months for a couple years until one of them just stopped hiking prices around renewal
dynamic pricing is very very prevalent, but doing it on food (like health insurance before it) is particularly egregious
I don't think this is a good example, because you're literally using more of the product that's being sold. I get where you're coming from but this one doesn't seem to really reinforce the point you are trying to make. It's like selling by weight or something if you wanted to compare it to groceries.
with the airline seat example some could argue that they have health reasons beyond their control and it's not their fault that airline seats are so small (they really are smaller than ever)
another example are stories of electricians charging more to people who want EV chargers installed because they already paid a premium to buy the EV, contractors will often bump up their prices if a house looks nicer, etc... these sort of biases have been rampant everywhere for a long time
I've heard people work around this by getting a plug-in charger instead of hardwired. They get a 14-50 plug put in saying it is for a welder for their home workshop or for an electric range or an RV hookup for when their parents visit or something like that. A clothes dryer outlet works too, but usually won't support as many amps.
All those, except the clothes dryer, still do give some indication you probably are reasonably well off or have well off parents at least, so might invite some gouging.
I think this is a more concerning problem and it's tough to tackle but I'd also say don't let perfect be the enemy of good. We can do some things to start with which I think would capture a lot of the downsides of these pricing models.
Taking advantage of your personal circumstances that is unrelated to cost to charge you more--especially when it is hidden from you--is what is bad and should be illegal.
Of course, some things are too good to be true, they apparently lost hundreds of millions of dollars on the effort before closing it down earlier this year. At least they did in my area in January, my understanding is they ended it everywhere they didn't have a physical store presence.
• Delivery is by a background checked salaried Walmart employee in a company van rather than third party contractors.
• Tipping is not allowed.
• Instead of just delivering to your doorstop you can have them deliver to your garage, or even inside your home where they will even unpack them and put the perishable items in your fridge and leave the rest neatly arranged on your counter top or table.
Since the minimum order for free delivery with Walmart+ is $35, a 10% tip on a single order would be more than the $3.33 that a $40 year annual subscription divide by 12 is (and most people would tip $5 on a minimum order rather than 10%).
Yes, that is transparently a scam that let's them set the price to "whatever you've got (or could access via loans)." That is exactly the type of thing that should be banned.
Wealth redistribution should be a transparent government policy, not individualized pricing, which makes it impossible for anyone to know ahead of time what anything costs, completely destroying any ability to plan or even have a meaningful concept of money.
Insurance makes more sense to have different factors for premiums, but the market would likely function much better if their algorithms were required to be public.
(I agree the U.S. university pricing system as it stands is far from perfect.)
People saying "oh but the poor" are emotionally manipulating you to enable themselves to maximally extract from each person.
Obviously, I think your second paragraph is an extreme overreaction; I have no stake in any university's profits, and I am not attempting to "emotionally manipulate" you.
With regards to insurance, that industry depends on ignorance. If an insurance company had perfect information (psychic, precognition level) on who's going to need a payout when and who's never, then the point of the insurance becomes nil. They're not going to enter contracts with individuals that result in a net loss, only with those that result in a net gain. That can look like them just raising prices until it results in a gain. If that's the case, people can just save and use their own money to cover the events that will happen[1], because insurance would not be of any benefit to anyone at all.
The way insurance works on a basic level is they know a percentage of people will have a set of events happen to them, but they don't know who. They have a large amount of clientele and charge everyone such that the revenue can cover the expenses of the unlucky percentage of their clientele and make a profit. To the individual, the insurance expense results in significantly less than what they would pay would they be part of the unlucky percentage without the insurance cover.
The arrangement is founded on the ignorance of who belongs to the unlucky percentage. The economics of insurance don't work without the ignorance. So yeah, at some point, algorithmic pricing of insurance likely ought to be banned if we still want insurance to exist on a meaningful level.
> Because passing laws without limits is what leads to unintended consequences.
On this "careful what you change for the consequences it may have" sort of idea, remember that algorithmic pricing is the new thing ("new" on the level it can now be, at least, with all the trading in data going on). It's the thing that may lead to consequential changes. Not having algorithmic pricing is the old, stable way. Passing this type of law is just putting the status quo in writing, in the face of the status quo possibly changing.
[1] Tangential, but possibly it wouldn't necessarily lead it being better to save. It'd be worse. They'd turn into some type of "care" service (health-care, car-care, person-may-will-crash-into-care, etc.) with a subscription payment model, which wouldn't be insurance anymore. It may continue to appear to be insurance because people will continue to buy it under the idea that it's irresponsible to not have insurance. The underlying service provider (hospitals, mechanic shops, etc.) instead of having normal people as the majority of their clients, now have assumably-wealthy insurance companies as clients, which means they can raise their prices more. So, you see the price difference, but insurance companies aren't really doing their job anymore. It wouldn't be the same thing going on. They're sort of a useless middleman you need, and that prevents the existence of affordable care.
> “Algorithmic-based price discrimination” does not include:
> 5. The covered retailer offers a discounted price on equal terms to one of the following groups of consumers:
> c. Members, enrollees, or participants in a loyalty, membership, including cooperative memberships, or rewards program [...]
Add AI to the mix and it gets worse. An AI algorithm instructed to maximize profits may charge double for a chocolate bar to someone it inferred was diabetic, but AI is non-deterministic so it would be difficult to prove the reasoning for its decision, which would be handy for plausible deniability.
And the government being able to purchase data that it would be illegal for it to gather is a massive and glaring loophole. The actions of the Trump Administration should make it obvious to everyone how massive databases with intimate and personal details could be weaponized.
$5.00 for a gallon of milk? No, I'll give you $2.50. Back and forth until you find a mutually agreeable price.
Is there some state/federal law that delegates power over some things to the municipalities/cities/counties etc that allow them passing ordnance like this?
It feels weird to me that this would not be a state / federal level decision, but maybe that's just my Finnish ass.
Its enforceable in that the city has a police department and zoning rights. So they can force businesses out for violating the law, and they have they have the monopoly of violence within the city to make sure you follow their directions. But whether thats funded or practicable depends on other factors.
Profit maximizing businesses want to capture as much of the economic surplus of transactions as possible by optimizing the price they charge. When businesses offer a single price their ability to do so is limited because some people with a lower WTP that is still above the producers WTA don't elect to purchase and on the flip side some people who have a higher WTP would be willing to pay more and don't.
To increase their profits therefore businesses can attempt to do what's referred to as "price discrimination" which is when they offer different prices to people based on the person's perceived WTP (there are different means of doing so, such as geographically based pricing, etc.,) and when they offer exactly the customer's WTP to every unique customer it's called perfect price discrimination, because they're capturing the entire value of all transactions.
In competitive markets, businesses ability to price discriminate is reduced, but not entirely eliminated.
Now... this surveillance pricing is basically a form of price discrimination. However, the interesting part is that while price discrimination in net is beneficial for businesses, it actually can also benefit lower income/lower WTP consumers by allowing them to buy at a lower price (since they wouldn't have bought at a higher price -- both the consumer and the business benefit here) but hurts customers with a higher income/WTP since the business can charge them more.
This is interesting because this is a somewhat rare regressive (hurts lower income people more than higher income people) anti-business policy. Generally, I think most anti-business policies are also progressive (well, except for the idiotic ones like broad tariffs) but in this case banning the ability of price discrimination through personalized pricing hurts businesses and lower income people while benefiting higher income people (the surveillance aspect of it could be thought of as an externality, which hurts everyone).
If you're highly anti-surveillance you might argue that it's net positive for everyone because lower income people wouldn't be surveilled in the same way (well, at least it wouldn't be applied, I don't think it would actually change the surveillance side of things) but that requires a normative position on whether surveillance is bad.
In theory this policy could probably be made non-redistributive (benefitting higher and lower income people equally) by adding a grocery tax that would be used to offset the impact to lower income people, but in practice it seems like it would be difficult to administer (especially in Seattle, which doesn't collect city taxes from people directly today, not to mention the opportunities for arbitrage).
"I assume the people I hate would support the opposite bad thing to this good thing."
What I would say is: "I assume that people who don't put the same value on the principle of self-sufficiency that I do would support a scheme to allow people of lesser means to buy groceries on the open market at a lower price than is permitted to me."
> the socialist left would like nothing better than to have surveillance pricing, so long as it is deployed in the aid of poor people
nothing about this makes sense. i think you're making an argument that the socialist left wants poor people to afford more, and yes that's true. but comparing that to price gouging is where logic left the station.
You are underestimating how much they want to take from the rich to subsidize others. They want to do this so much that they just implemented an unconstitutional income tax against the rich. As long as it's only rich people getting price gauged I do not think they would lose any sleep.
This would fix this issue, it would destroy the surveillance models of Google/Facebook, and it would fix the Flock issue, etc. It would also fix the Roe v Wade issue: women would be able to get abortions in the first couple months of pregnancy without the possibility of harassment, since law enforcement would have no capacity to detect pregnancy until then.
Also, tech won't save us had a podcast on the dynamic pricing topic: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/how-data-is-changing-a...
Try to run a school when you can’t maintain data on the students.
HIPAA is an example of that.
All personal data should be treated with at or near HIPAA levels of security. If I give my personal information to my bank, or google, that's fine for them to look at it, but it's not ok if that information magically lands in the hands of Coca Cola for marketing.
You could build a test: the company should not be able to derive any additional value from 100 fully anonymized interactions with the same person as from 100 interactions with a deanonymized individual. Google obviously fails this test since targeted advertising is much more valuable if you have non-anonymized entities.
The doctor can store my data because it is necessary to provide me with the service, but the doctor shouldn't be able to sell my data, nor correlate it with their other patients' data.
Of course, a doctor will learn from treating me and become a better doctor, so you can't actually enforce this totally in practice. But it's like porn - you know when you see the violation.
If you don't want Google to be able to do anything at all with information you put into their system, easy, don't open an account!
I can agree with some of the other points, Google shouldn't be hoovering up mountains of data, etc. Just have to be careful of extremes. If you enshrine something bad in something as difficult to change as a constitution, you're stuck with it, and all your unintended consequences, potentially forever. You say "you can't actually enforce this totally in practice" but have you ever met a law firm? They would absolutely take the most extreme possible interpretation and milk all of society for billions a year if they can find an appropriate avenue.
This kind of extremism is what derailed some constitutional reforms in South America over the past decade. It started with reasonable center-left people saying some reasonable things, the radical left seized the process and wrote the final draft and faced with a choice between insanity and an unsatisfactory status quo people made the only palatable choice.
All aspects of the commercial transaction should be clear and transparent: I give the grocery store cash, it gives me food. My data shouldn't be taken from me, and nor should I have to consent to my data to be taken from me in order to shop there.
Google can store and serve me my data. It cannot use my data for commercial purposes that do not directly serve me. Nor should it be able to aggregate my interactions in a way that serves to increase its own profit, as this, over time, increases the relative power of the firm.
If you're to see any ads at all, it is vastly preferable that you see random ads for things that you would never be interested in and that register as pure noise to you. Things you could be convinced to buy, or propaganda that elicits some response (positive or negative) are the worst case to encounter.
It does until that mechanism is turned against me, as I have to assume it will be.
Unfortunately these things are never so clean as in the theoretical model. As a monopoly, there are likely many situations where interaction with said monopoly is unavoidable.
This definitely happens, at least in the UK. With anonymised data.
What's special about slander that we can have a say "you're not allowed to make defamatory false statements about people," but we couldn't have "you're not allowed to spy on people and sell information about them"?
Granted slander is a civil and not criminal matter, but if I could sue companies for sharing personal information about me that would still be something.
We also know that mortgage lenders use irrelevant---well, scratch that---protected data to make decisions (i.e. discriminatory). Race for example is not supposed to be used in lending decisions.
Fraud detection can probably be solved by other reasonable means. And in any case, if you take the fraud argument to the limit, then you'd end up advocating for constant surveillance to prevent fraud. Equifax, Experian, and Transunion are all horrible companies who do their ostensible job minimally well, while maximizing the exploitation of the data of the people.
Aside from the wrong acronym, the privacy and access rights are the central focus of FERPA, but pretty far down the list for HIPAA, despite being what many people think it is centrally about—which is why both “rights” and “privacy” are in the name of FERPA but (despite the joke about the common error in the acronym that “the second P in HIPAA is for Privacy”) neither is in the name of HIPAA.
This seems like a category error on two fronts. First, the constitution is a law which applies to the government, not to private entities such as stores. The proper way to restrain behavior of private entities is with a regular law. Second, we already have a right to privacy under the US constitution (amendment 9 says that rights not enumerated in the constitution are still valid rights, and amendment 10 says that they are reserved to the people).
Moreover, as others have said, you really don't want to use the constitution as your method of first resort when solving societal problems. It's hard to change (by design), and you don't want to have unintended consequences baked in at that level. Sometimes an amendment is necessary, but that needs to be used very sparingly.
The advertising model is socialist utopian business model, where everyone gets the same service, for the same cost, with money being no barrier to entry. Kids in Indian slums are watching the same Youtube as Moms watching 105" OLED TVs in the Hampton's. Hell that mom might even be watching that kids video, which Google happily hosts and promotes for them. All for the cost of being shown detergent and car ads.
People take the internet for granted, and treat ads as some invasive species commandeered by mega corps to extract money from the communal nature of the modern web.
The alternative though is not the current internet sans ads, the alternative is paywalls on everything, and only the rich kid having a Google, Meta, Discord, and Reddit account.
Ads suck, but at least make an effort to see the whole picture.
Take for instance the 2nd amendment. It is constantly under siege by government officials, both elected and appointed, as well as an activist judicial. Thankfully the SCOTUS has been somewhat successful in parlaying these incursions but someday the perpetrators will succeed, and I think mainly because there are no consequences for trying.
Just an example and JMHO.
Sounds like you have been a victim of fraud. At least according to a former Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court. To prevent more people falling prey to fraudsters, Justice Stevens recommends that this amendment should be repealed - https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/27/opinion/john-paul-stevens...
I think you might be missing a sentence or a citation there, because Stevens was an associate justice, never the chief on SCOTUS.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Paul_Stevens
Whether that narrow scope is/should-be still true is trickier given the 14th amendments, although I believe it was wrongly included in the incorporation doctrine. [1]
[0] I know Google-search scoped to HN used to find them, and today it doesn't. The enshittification continues, is it time for me to start slowly scraping my own comment-history?
[1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/incorporation_doctrine
Amendment 10, brought into force at the same time as amendment 2, says that the states can't infringe upon the right to bear arms either. That is very far from "zero question" as you stated.
> Allow me, Mr. Speaker, in passing, to say that this amendment takes from any State any right that ever pertained to it. No State ever had the right, under the forms of law or otherwise, to deny to any freeman the equal protection of the laws or to abridge the privileges or immunities of any citizen of the Republic, although many of them have assumed and exercised the power, and that without remedy.
-- John Bingham, 39th Cong., 1st Sess., p. 2542
> Such is the character of the privileges and immunities spoken of in the second section of the fourth article of the Constitution. To these privileges and immunities, whatever they may be -- for they are not and cannot be fully defined in their entire extent and precise nature -- to these should be added the personal rights guarantied and secured by the first eight amendments of the Constitution; such as the freedom of speech and of the press; the right of the people peaceably to assemble and petition the Government for a redress of grievances, a right appertaining to each and all the people; the right to keep and to bear arms; the right to be exempted from the quartering of soldiers in a house without the consent of the owner; the right to be exempt from unreasonable searches and seizures, and from any search or seizure except by virtue of a warrant issued upon a formal oath or affidavit; the right of an accused person to be informed of the nature of the accusation against him, and his right to be tried by an impartial jury of the vicinage; and also the right to be secure against excessive bail and against cruel and unusual punishments.
-- Jacob Howard, 39th Cong., 1st Sess., p. 2765
It's correct to say that the second amendment was a limit on the federal government only as decided in Barron v. Baltimore (1833). Total incorporation was the intent of the 14th even though the courts ultimately re-affirmed Barron in US v. Cruikshank (1876) which was a 14th amendment case over the 1st and 2nd amendment. De Jonge v. Oregon (1937) overturned part of Cruikshank by incorporating the right to peaceable assembly from the 1st, later that year Palko vs. Connecticut created selective incorporation doctrine and incorporated double jeopardy from the 5th, and of course McDonald v. Chicago (2010) overturned the other part of Cruikshank by incorporating the 2nd. All this to say, incorporation doctrine is pretty convoluted. If you think that the 2nd amendment should not be incorporated but the rest should then that would make things even more absurd. There's just no way via either total or selective incorporation that you can exclude the 2nd without it becoming nine judges determine what rights the government grants you, thus defeating the entire purpose of the bill of rights.
That seems like an exceptionally tepid constitutional violation to pick, after the last several years of massively-worse and flagrant violations.
Are you offering it because you think it represents something typical, and current events will prove to be an extreme outlier?
More seriously though what good is a constitution if it can be violated without repercussions?
You and I do agree on one thing though but I would adjust that to being the last 40 years rather than just several.
Then, when they know they’re proof against an armed citizenry, they’ll start running government policy as a way to line their own pockets. Why, it wouldn’t surprise me if a sufficiently emboldened crook, safe in the knowledge, that you personally cannot stop them by armed force, started to flout the laws left and right.
Put it another way. I never fail to be amazed by the fantasies that govern significant chunks of American thought. People who’ve lived there, and also in other places are able to figure out pretty quickly where they’re actually safer, and more respected by their government, and able to live a decent wholesome life.
I’ll note in passing that there are other countries with similar levels of gun ownership but less suicide and violence. Perhaps the first is because they have slightly more left leaning social policies. I’m all but convinced that the second is because they aren’t driven to a frenzy of terror by their local media. Maybe that cat has escaped its bag and isn’t ever going back. A shame. To live one’s life in fear of angry frightened people with guns sounds awful to me.
Last thing. I’ve had guns pointed at me twice. Once by an infant British soldier in 1990s Belfast. And once by a robbing bastard in a very wealthy part of Los Angeles. Neither was fun, but at least the soldier was predictable in the then prevailing circumstances