Privacy and discrimination risks from surveillance pricing in grocery sales
Problem
Consumers may face personalized pricing based on personal data and privacy invasions when buying groceries. The new ordinance aims to ban such practices, but unclear details raise concerns about implementation and potential discrimination.
Pain points
- Personalized pricing causing price differences for identical items
- Personal data being collected and used for pricing
- Lack of transparency on discounts and pricing
- Potential discriminatory pricing (e.g., based on weight, health conditions)
Questions to verify
- Does the ordinance explicitly prohibit personalized pricing based on personal data?
- How will retailers achieve real-time price transparency and disclose discounts?
- What is consumer acceptance and usage intent for existing discount mechanisms?
Evidence
quote · @匿名
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.Also, tech
quote · @匿名
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.
quote · @匿名
The devil is really in the details:> 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.
Disclaimer: this card is distilled by AI from community discussions as “pain point evidence”. It is a starting point for need analysis and validation, not a “validated market need”. AI has analytical limits; please open the original discussion above to manually verify before key decisions.