Recent polling from Groundwork shows voters overwhelmingly support all customers paying the same price for the same item
Yesterday, Groundwork Collaborative Executive Director Lindsay Owens joined Spectrum New York 1 to discuss New York State’s new dynamic pricing disclosure law and call on more states to ban personalized or surveillance pricing to protect consumers. In the interview, Lindsay breaks down the law in New York and how consumers can protect their privacy and avoid being targeted by this predatory practice.
She also highlighted recent polling from Groundwork Collaborative and Data for Progress that shows over 80% of voters believe businesses should charge all customers the same price for the same item. Watch the interview here.
“If lawmakers don’t get their act together and really think about regulating this space, we could be facing a world in which there is no standardized pricing. You have no idea what anything costs, there’s no predictability, and all prices are set according to your desperation and your individual ability to pay,” Owens stated.
“This is a really tough position for fair markets,” she continued. “Our economy depends on predictability. Our ability to budget for our household, to know how much we need to bring home an income to cover basic expenses like groceries and insurance, and things like that depends upon predictability. I think we’re really moving into a dark place that lacks predictability and transparency if left unchecked.”
EXCERPTS
On how dynamic pricing works: “If you’ve ever bought an airline ticket, you’ve experienced dynamic pricing. This is really just a pricing model where prices go up when goods are scarce, when there are fewer seats left on the plane, and prices go down when there are plenty of available seats. What we’re experiencing now is a more pernicious form of dynamic pricing that’s less transparent. And this is a type of pricing, we call it personalized pricing, where prices are starting to be set based on demographic characteristics, whether you’re a woman or a man, based on geographic characteristics, where you live, and even potentially based on characteristics unique to you, how much money you have left in your bank account, how long you’ve been hovering your mouse over the swim suit you plan to buy for this summer.”
On ethical concerns with dynamic pricing: “Personalized pricing poses a few problems. The first is that it’s not transparent. You have no idea that the price is being tailored just for you. If you’re in a supermarket and you’re in line behind someone, and you guys have the same items: a loaf of bread, a gallon of milk. You’re probably going to pay the same price. When you’re shopping online, you may have no idea that your neighbor is being offered a better deal than you and you’re paying more. I think transparency is a huge issue here. The fact that this pricing is being set based on data they’re collecting about you, often without your knowledge, is really an invasion of privacy. There are real privacy concerns here too. And then finally, I think there’s just a sense of fairness that this really violates. We’ve done some polling on this: 83% of Americans think that everyone should be offered the same price for the same item one item one price. So it really violates just a basic sense of fairness in pricing and in our economy.”
On New York’s dynamic pricing disclosure law: “This is really a huge first step, a first-in-the-nation attempt at checking the most pernicious forms of personalized or surveillance pricing. The New York law doesn’t go far enough, it merely requires companies to disclose when they’re using your personal data to set pricing. It doesn’t ban the practice altogether, as an earlier version of the proposal had proposed, but it is a really important first step, giving consumers some transparency around this practice, and when you see that little disclosure that your data is being used to set your pricing, you can click off that website and go find a retailer who isn’t going to use your data to set pricing, who’s going to offer fair, predictable and transparent pricing.”