People are getting really angry ...

Daniel Jurman

People are getting really angry. From Flock Safety cameras spying on our ass to hidden gotchas whenever one goes to buy something, the slop, the veniality and the crassness of the once wonderful net has become a worse version of Idiocracy where everything's for sale, including your soul.

Yours truly has talked about this nonsense often but now it's a plague and folks are getting pissed off about it. Surveillance 101, from Palantir to the government and big tech, it never ends, something needing to be addressed before something untoward happens.

The discounts, promotions and offers you receive from businesses from Starbucks to Kroger to Target to Home Depot are all too often targeted calculations about what to charge you, built from data including your location, browsing history and social media activities. This information can be used to build hidden profiles of customers’ intelligence, abilities and preferences, which can signal how much you are willing to pay for any given item or service. When you are presented with a deal, you may not have realized that algorithms have already invisibly sized you up with the goal of squeezing your wallet.

This is a part of the commercial surveillance business model. Over the past decade, companies built up infrastructure to harness vast amounts of consumer data, using it to target individuals with unfair price hikes. Now, the concept of a price is itself degraded. Left in its place are numbers engineered for individual consumers, based not on market conditions but on the weaponization of your personal data. Policymakers should mandate that companies offer a real price — one that must be simple, public, accessible and consistent in a given market, with rules on discounts and loyalty programs to promote fairness and protect consumers and competition. No more targeted price adjustments based on surveillance. No more hidden costs or fees. No more prices that change on the fly.

Some argue that targeting and personalization are simply how modern discounts work, a natural evolution of coupons. But there is a meaningful difference between a public offer and a surveillance-driven one. The Sunday circular goes to everyone in the neighborhood: The terms are visible, the discount is available to anyone who clips it, and consumers know what they’re signing up for. Surveillance pricing works in reverse. Companies collect data, infer your willingness to pay and set a price, without you ever knowing your neighbor was charged less for the same thing. One rewards a consumer’s action; the other exploits a consumer’s profile.

Bait and switch applies

In 2022, Target settled a case brought by multiple California counties accusing the company of advertising one price on the website or app outside of the store and then changing the price once customers were in the store. When a traveler is looking for flights or accommodations, sites can show different prices based on the customer’s location — higher for those searching from, say, the San Francisco Bay Area, lower for Phoenix or Kansas City. Last year, when a former Washington Post reporter requested data Starbucks held about him, he noticed that the more he visited the coffee company, the fewer discounts he received.

Per Flock's website, its cameras are able to track individual people, not just cars.

Question, is Flock selling it's data to significant others? One never knows, do one? - Fats Waller