Why is this limited to groceries? I don't want to pay a different price than others for any category of item, not just groceries.
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?
Not comparable. The markets can still charge wherever they want, but it needs to be priced per item and not per customer. In your house counterexample, you could set whatever list price you want.
you already do pay a price difference for many categories of items, insurance is a big one... where you live, how old you are, gender, etc
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
The best solution is a constitutional amendment that actually enshrines a right to privacy. Among other things, the retention, aggregation, correlation of any personal data should be illegal (including for commercial purposes). (Storage on behalf of users in encrypted form could be made OK. Could also be refined to support retention of data of the medical, legal, etc kind with the attendant non-admissibility protections.)
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.
You can have privacy and an institution can collect data.
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.
Yes, mostly, but google shouldn't be able to "look" at it either. No entity should be able to derive a commercial benefit from my data; any commercial value of my own data should accrue entirely to me.
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.
Would it? The 1st is a prohibition on the rights of government, not private parties. Would the new amendment apply to the government, or to private sector, or to individuals? In any case, the 1st and the 28th? would continually be butting heads, since the 1st prohibits congress from passing laws that would enforce the 28th (and by extension, the states via the 14th). Would a newspaper be allowed to publish unflattering personal, privacy violating details? Would you be allowed to put up a political flyer alleging the same? I'm not sure an amendment is _the best solution_.
This is impossible is you consider the financial sector - any kind of unsecured private lending like mortgages become dead in the water, fraud detection goes out the window, money laundering, etc.
Good points, but there should be partial solutions. For example, you can present data about the consumer in order to decide on the mortgage, but once the transaction is complete, the data should disappear. You need something akin to "the data can be used only for the particular purpose of the transaction at hand, and the data must be wholly necessary for the transaction at hand."
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.
Cool thought but until violating the said constitution actually has enforceable consequences it’s not more than a paper tiger.
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.
> The gun lobby’s interpretation of the Second Amendment is one of the greatest pieces of fraud, I repeat the work fraud, on the American people by special interest groups that I have seen in my lifetime. The real purpose of the Second Amendment was to ensure that state armies—the militia—would be maintained for the defense of the state. The very language of the Second Amendment refutes any argument that it was intended to guarantee every citizen an unfettered right to any kind of weapon he or she desires.
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...
> "Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court. To prevent more people falling prey to fraudsters, Justice Stevens recommends that this amendment should be repealed"
I think you might be missing a sentence or a citation there, because Stevens was an associate justice, never the chief on SCOTUS.
> until violating the said constitution actually has enforceable consequences it’s not more than a paper tiger. [...] Take for instance the 2nd amendment.
That seems like an exceptionally tepid constitutional violation to pick, given the last several years of massively-worse and flagrant violations.
Are you offering it because you think it has/will represents a typical phenomenon, and that current events are just an aberration?
> 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".
It can never be better for consumers. The only way a business would adopt this practice is if it leads to greater revenues. On average, that necessarily means worse prices for the average consumer.
> 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.
> It can never be better for consumers. The only way a business would adopt this practice is if it leads to greater revenues. On average, that necessarily means worse prices for the average consumer.
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 somehow arrange for a redistributive effect. But in practice, the firms are likely to charge each consumer the maximum that consumer can afford. These firms are not engaging in some philanthropic process here.
If you want redistribution, implement a wealth tax.
Are there any examples of markets where price discrimination is good for the average consumer? Airline travel is the one that pops to mind - first class customers pay well above marginal cost and effectively subsidize the cattle class, right?
>It can never be better for consumers. The only way a business would adopt this practice is if it leads to greater revenues. On average, that necessarily means worse prices for the average consumer.
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.
Stores already have that in the form of having cheaper and more expensive products in the same category (for example, 5 different brands of tomato sauce).
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.
They already do charge different prices for the same seat, based on their assessment of the type of passenger you are.
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.
Nobody is saying you can’t have different classes of service or product offerings. But if I’m buying a banana or you’re buying it, it’s the still a banana.
Different air travelers can pay very different prices for the same seat.
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.
If two consumers purchase the same item at the same time, it should be the same price. That's what we're debating. If an airline raises prices closer to departure, then that's not a violation of privacy, nor discriminatory in the sense we're discussing here.
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.
I have a club card account with a fake name on it. While they may track the purchase I make and know that a single person made them all, it's not attached to anything that is linked to me. My understanding is that they can't link credit card numbers to purchases, they can only use the number to run the transaction.
It's not great they track purchasing, but if it's not linked to me I don't really care that much.
Many grocery stories were also experimenting with digital signage that is dynamic as well. So many not individually profiled but at level of hours/neighborhood. They are trying to bring it where they can.
Is that assuming Instacart/DoorDash? Click and collect or even delivery from grocery stores isn't nearly that bad, right? I thought it was pretty competitive.
For a lot of people their time and their effort is worth more to them than their money unless it is something they particularly enjoy doing themselves.
In this bill it just lists grocery stores as one of the examples where this practice could be banned, I wonder if it would apply to other more general online storefronts such as amazon.
Because passing laws without limits is what leads to unintended consequences. For example, should algorithmic pricing of car insurance be banned? Should universities be banned from offering financial aid to lower-wealth students?
Because I'm a bit lazy/busy, is there a summary that covers things like shopper cards/discount cards/membership requirements, and if this allows businesses to find different means of escape from the rules.
This is great news, but a bit surprising. I think, truth be told, the socialist left would like nothing better than to have surveillance pricing, so long as it is deployed in the aid of poor people. And of course the designation "surveillance pricing" would have to go. Something like "equity pricing" would have a much better ring to it.
Does anyone know how authority on passing these kinds of rules go, and if they are enforceable?
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.
My understanding is that in typical Seattle fashion, this is a new legal requirement with zero funding or staffing to implement and enforce it. If you feel you have been wronged, hire an attorney and sue.
The constitution generally, at both the federal level and state levels generally has a clause like "if its not enumerated here then the next division down has the right to regulate it" hence why the feds regulate interstate commerce, but not state internal commerce. This usually stops at the county level, not the city level, but large cities are effectively their own counties so that distinction doesnt matter much.
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.
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?
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