‘Surveillance Pricing’ Comes Under Scrutiny

He's written about what something called AI surveillance pricing, which is like dynamic pricing, but personalized based on who you are and what you've done before. Is that right? Yeah. This is the idea that as pricing algorithms get more and more sophisticated, we already have this to some extent with social media advertising, where, you know, you have a pair of shoes that follows you around the internet. Uh, there are groups, many of them left leaning, many of them trying to kind of get populist rage going, warning about the potential for these same kinds of technologies to apply to things like at grocery stores. So the idea and this again, is mostly theoretical at this point, but that you're walking to a grocery store and the price of, of a good will change based on other stuff you have in your shopping cart. Uh, so, so, for instance, and this this came up in the story I just wrote there. Walmart has a patent that suggests that they would change the price of mayonnaise if you already had tuna fish in their car. Now, I should say Walmart responded to this by saying, we are not changing the price of mayonnaise yet. This is just a patent. Uh, we're not doing this. They're committed to the, um, you know, the slogan, which is everyday low prices. Uh, but but it does sort of show you that there are at least some people within these companies that are thinking about this stuff, and we are seeing this in maybe less high profile example. So the technology is there, but it may not be, uh, implemented at the moment. It feels like this is something that politicians would jump on, especially those who are running for election in November. Well, I can I can imagine that they would. Yeah. Even Republicans got to look at this. I mean, is it in place now, if Jessica Karl looks an airplane ticket and she comes back six hours later, they jacked up the price because I know she was there six hours. The airplane one is one where it is not. It's pretty muddy. So the airlines say, no, we don't do that there. Anyone who's bought an airline ticket, though, Will will see that the prices change. Yes. Very often there are these kind of like one off cases. In fact, one came up during a hearing in Congress. Republicans Josh Hawley has been kind of ringing the bell on this. I think the issue is that they have so many different fare classes, you know, potentially dozens, even hundreds where it starts to get very close to personal. My summers. I'm getting taken to the cleaners every time.