šŗ How I Tricked Big Techās AI Pricing Algorithms to Save $8,793
(www.youtube.com)
from davel@lemmy.ml to privacy@lemmy.ml on 18 Jul 20:57
https://lemmy.ml/post/50233665
from davel@lemmy.ml to privacy@lemmy.ml on 18 Jul 20:57
https://lemmy.ml/post/50233665
Most of the things you interact with online are tracking your location, your device type, and your digital footprint to predict exactly how desperate you are to buy something. If the algorithm thinks you have money, or simply lack options, it alters the price in real-time.
To prove how widespread āsurveillance pricingā has become, I decided to see if I could outsmart it. This involved exploiting corporate registry loopholes to create a fake corporate entity, hiring an improv actor off Craigslist to establish a completely separate digital identity, and strapping a burner phone to a drone to make purchases from the airspace above the wealthiest gated community in Minnesota.
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I donāt think this guy has hacked surveillance pricing in ways that are practicably replicable, but his video has piqued my curiosity.
Edit to add: There doesnāt seem to be much in the way of evidence-based, practical advice currently, except to shop in physical stores and to comparison shop. kqed.org/ā¦/surveillance-pricing-is-making-life-moā¦
Completely un-replicable. Thereās just no way my drone will reach Minnesota from Ireland.
Iāll get my coatā¦
Nah - all you have to do is join the Ukraine army, & youāll have access to drones that can do what was once thought impossible.
Lol they seem to have the good tech alright.
It does seem that the real purchasing power of AI comes down to erasing the benefits of the internet for individuals by obfuscation.
This is one of my biggest reasons for increasing my data privacy journey. Does anybody have any info/ opnions on whether creating a data vacuum through VPN usage and degoogling affects your digital footprint in terms of these surveillance pricing?
Iād also like to know. Sellers can know when youāre using a popular VPN service or have DeGoogled, but I donāt know how they may use that information. Perhaps theyāll try to punish you into submission by jacking prices to the moon or refusing to serve their website altogether. Reddit and some other sites already block VPNs.
<img alt="" src="https://lemmy.ml/pictrs/image/7e5ae437-f670-4f62-8a4d-b9a9a9dda83a.webp">
There will never be a silver bullet, because this will be an endless arms race between sellers and savvy consumers.
Super question. šš¼
The truth is no one except those inside the companies determining pricing really knows. And it can change at anytime if they find some new price discrimination data point to exploit. In the video they say it basically comes down to a desperation score.
My guess/sense at this moment is that itās slightly better as the type of person willing to learn and explore the privacy options and settings and have a little extra income to put towards them will be aware of shopping alternatives and therefore have a lower desperation score
Info no. Opinions yes!
It make sense to me, that if you lack a big digital footprint, they will give the highest price.
They always call these discounts, not extra fees. Put the tracker in your car, get cheaper car insurance! Use our club card, enjoy discounted groceries! They donāt call it an extra cost if you donāt. Even though itās mathematically the same! I think there may even be a legal difference. There is certainly a psychological difference between āyou get charged extraā which nobody wants, and āget a discountā. Yayyyy! Who doesnāt enjoy a discount???
Also, they want to make the attractive choice, the one that gives them the most data. So they will crank up the pain for ppl who opt out of the surveilence.
There is a glimmer of hope tho! Basically NOBODY likes this suveilence pricing. There are 24 US states that have pending bills to ban the practice. Maryland have passed theirs already. This is another case where writing to our reps makes a difference.
If you put in a local area code and Jennyās number it works at every club location because someone always uses it. Ymmv
Anecdotal, but Iāve been using Fauxx for a month or two and have noticed that ads I see (those few that manage to get through my blockers) are more generic, donāt apply to my demographic, or are even in a language I donāt speak.
I do practice basic data privacy, but I think that data poisoning also has a positive impact in obscuring your digital footprint. There will always be data from when I was less privacy-minded, so I feel itāll be more effective to both create a vacuum and fill that void with junk data.
Very interesting app, thanks for sharing!
Iām wondering if there is something similar for a pi hole so I could poison the data from my entire home.
Looks like there is Fauxx-Desktop that you could probably run on your pi-hole machine.
At some point your lack of tracking itself becomes a data point. When someone shows up to a website who is a complete data ghost, the site has to figure out how to react to that. I could see companies saying, āwell, if someone has no record, thereās two possibilities. Either one, theyāre chronically homeless and are living completely off the grid. Or two, theyāre somehow who goes to great lengths to hide their tracks. In the former case, we can ignore them when setting our prices, as they canāt afford our product anyway. In the latter case, we can charge them the maximum, as wealthy people can more afford to care about their privacy, and the person avoiding the tracking will probably assume weāre actually giving them the better deal.ā
I imagine most such systems would be set up so that by default the maximum price is charged, and itās only lowered if tracking data is available to suggest a lower price is more likely to create a more profitable sale.
Thatās the most clickbaity title and thumbnail Iāve seen here in a while.
Good point. Shows how brainwashed we are by what we readā¦
I live in Minnesota and use GrapheneOS with IronFox and uBlock, NoScript, and Privacy Badger. My desktop is Debian with librewolf and the same extensions.
I decided to check Spam prices at various Targets on both my phone and desktop. I donāt typically shop at Target, though I do have an account with them but I havenāt logged in in years. I was also not logged in for the testing.
I tried at my local Target and a few around the cities and got the same prices regardless of being on mobile or desktop. Only difference was between stores with prices ranging between $4.69 and $5.59.
I did not physically go anywhere different during this test, nor did I use a VPN, so that may have been why I was getting the same prices on both devices. I also really donāt know how much Target actually knows about me other than my IP and that I block stuff.
I recently learned about fingerprinting.
coveryourtracks.eff.org
Yeah thatās why I use what I use. Iāve checked that before and as long as I have JS disabled Iām at 1/1134 which is a pretty good score. Although sometimes you have to unblock sites to get them to work, so ĀÆ\(ć)/ĀÆ. Although at least webgl can be blocked separately.
Itās a mixed bag really. Disabling JavaScript thwarts a lot of tracking efforts. But at the same time it puts you into a very small niche of users that, combined with other data points (user agent, IP location) makes you pretty fingerprintable.
Coming from a fellow JS Disabler, mind you.
I disabled javascript for that test and like so many other security feature today, it just prevented the page from fully loading.
Weird. It works for me without JS, although itās a little bit jank.
Interesting. I passed 2 out of 3. I have a unique headers problem. Using vanadium on GOS. Is this the place to download ironfox from ? gitlab.com/ironfox-oss/IronFox/-/releases
I downloaded from f-droid but that works also
Same, Iām also in a bunch of deals and sales channelsā¦ Sometimes you can find great things. Most differences in pricing comes from franchise/corporate pricing and slight price variationsā¦ The price of milk, eggs and soda, etc will be slightly different in NC and CA because of cost of living, taxes, and competition.
Now would I be surprised if mega corporations started a system where they varied price based on what they think they can get out of each person? No I wouldnāt. Do I think theyāre looking at all that big data while twirling their mustaches and rubbing their hands together? Yeah I do, greedy little pricks. I just donāt think weāre there yet.
Did you try checking while using data on your phone?
Using different network might give varying results.
I did but I didnāt think about it until later so I didnāt check as many stores. I tried it in a new incognito instance to avoid tracking cookies and etc, but I still got the same prices as with wifi. Although at that point they could have already identified me in some way, perhaps looking up only spam and blocking JS* makes me unique enough to identify.
* I did have to unblock the bare minimum needed to see the spam prices, so itās possible that could have allowed them to track me better as well.