This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
The story and headline are pushing a narrative that hides what is happening.
The FTC made sure we didn't call it "surveillance pricing" and shifted from prevention to disclosure.
https://prospect.org/2026/08/21/ftc-says-it-will-enforce-surveillance-pricing-it-wont/
I didn't get that it's hiding anything. says it right there in the blurb:
The agency said it cannot ban personalized pricing under its current authority, but it will pursue enforcement action against companies that fail to meet its disclosure requirements.
Unless I'm missing something, I understood that to mean exactly what you said.
They are going to "enforce" disclosure rules but not enforce to prevent the substantive harms of surveillance pricing. It's framed (and many stories and readers and commenters run with the narrative) that it's a restriction, when it's actually a permission. This means that unlike the direction Lina Khan's FTC was taking to prevent surveillance pricing, it is saying to companies, "It's fine to surveillance price as long as you disclose." Meaning, open season.
It's the difference between, for example, enforcing actual net neutrality versus enforcing "disclosure" about violating net neutrality.
Disclosure is how you kill stuff like this. Who's going to patronize a store they know is charging them double what the next guy in line pays? This is 'murica, only poor people who can't afford to get to the discount stores are supposed to be overpaying.
I think unfortunately that overestimates the amount of information and discernment shoppers exercise, versus doorbuster/marketed deals and brand loyalty. Going back to net neutrality, "disclosure" just meant that fine print would be used to disclose, along with false "benefits" like saying you get "free" Netflix data on your cell plan, to sell it as a feature.
When you are online, as well, you will have no idea what anyone else is paying. The retailer will completely control the information environment unless consumers put forth an unrealistic, disproportionate amount of time to compare prices.
Disclosure is not how you kill stuff like this, it's how opposition to this dies.
unless consumers put forth an unrealistic, disproportionate amount of time to compare prices.
It kind of shocks me that services like camel camel camel didn't get more popular over the past 20 years. They've been out there, they're not hard to use, but it seems like people would rather blunder through life uninformed than take a minute to research before acting. This applies at retail, and the voting booth.
Yes, agreed and exactly - and now Amazon's "price history" AI button helps Amazon keep shoppers from using independent (more reliable) tools.
I think what makes this worse is that Camel Camel Camel may not be able to even function in a surveillance pricing world. It requires an objective same-price basis, and once surveillance pricing algorithmically re-prices for each shopper, a single-point third party can no longer track the price reliably for everyone.
Then the reason why surveillance price tracking is so unrealistic is because shoppers would need to actively submit and refresh their pricing for any comparison site to be valid, and that just isn't going to happen.
that's nothing like a crackdown. that's like saying, privacy policies are a crackdown on data brokers
It's even right in the dek: Businesses must disclose if they use consumer data to set individual prices.
Did they even read the article?
Just fucking ban it
If they scaled it to be charging musky $300k for a soda and charging a janitor 8¢ we wouldn’t be complaining.
We wouldnt but some Republican twat would. They'd btiche about the janitor getting a deal even though they themselves are just a unemployed Republican meth head from Appalachia paying 5¢
"Cracking down" does not look like this. This is the equivalent of mumbling under their breath, not cracking down.
The FTC is only doing their job because it affects the rich more than the poor
How long until someone figures out how to artificially generate cookies that result in you getting the lowest price?
Of course the maga FTC head shut down public comments and RFI related to this very thing.
I wonder how much that chucklefuck profited off of this move.
He will take bribes to hand out exceptions, I guarantee it
My guess is someone with enough money or proximity to power got gouged and bitched about it.
And didn’t Delta announce that they were going to do just that.
Airlines have been doing this for decades, they've just got new tracking tools - but they've used everything at their disposal forever.
And they are specifically excluded from the crackdown for some reason
Bull. Fucking. Shit. If anything, this was something Lina Khan started, and Trump forgot to cancel.
That should be super illegal.
No. It is super illegal but didn't you know that as long as you tape a sign that says "digital" or equivalent on an illegal thing, is suddenly a new thing and can't be handled with the current rules. Everyone knows that! It's why we have illegal taxis, hotels, and spy networks all in the palm of your hand. Isn't the future great?
@chuckleslord @RedGreenBlue The trick is to convince you that YOU are saving money while being scammed. Loyalty cards in a nutshell. Fake taxis are exactly that: people shut up because they think that they're saving some bucks.
@chuckleslord @RedGreenBlue I always explain people that loyalty cards don't reduce their spending, that would be counter productive for the brand, but trick you into buying yet more even if the profit on that overhead is lower (never zero though, they're for profits)
@chuckleslord @RedGreenBlue not a bad scam considering back in the 90s and 00s a ton of garbage patents were granted for "(obvious established real-world thing) but on a computer" leading to a bunch of blatantly fraudulent lawsuits that some Texas dumbasses said were valid *coughbecausetheywerepaidoffcough* for some reason
Folks making and enforcing laws are amazingly vulnerable to fundamentally meaningless semantics when there's money to be made
@chuckleslord @RedGreenBlue @SallyStrange “New startup Fraudr aims to disrupt the marketplace for false advertising”
@Unixbigot @chuckleslord @RedGreenBlue @SallyStrange Oddly enough, this service doesn't actually manage to do what it claims in its advertising.
@chuckleslord @RedGreenBlue the future might be great, it's the present that's worrying me. Oh, and the future, that's a worry too.
Should be, but it's not. It's discrimination, but discrimination is perfectly legal as long as it's not done on the basis of one of the handful of protected classes (race, sex, religion, etc.)
Companies can figure out how to charge different rates for richer people. Maybe the government can too.
Be careful all hotels and Trivago. We're on to you.
