price discrimination

guckfoogle@sh.itjust.works to Asklemmy@lemmy.ml – 118 points –

So we took a family vacation recently and we had to drive halfway across America and what creeped me the fuck out was how we were getting such different prices on different phones while looking at the same hotel room on Priceline. For example I would look for a hotel in Chicago and find a room for a $180, then my cousin is also looking for a room on his phone and I look over and the same hotel room is $50-$70 cheaper. This kept on happening in every city we went to, like there was such a huge fluctuation between the prices one person would get on their phone and what someone else was getting. We noticed that the people with higher end Samsung phones were getting a much lower rate than those with cheaper phones. Have you ever experienced such price discrimination and is there really anyway to protect yourself from it? And do you think it's ethical for companies to charge different rates for the same product? Should there be some legislation to protect consumers from this seeing as how AI is just going to make it easier for companies to price gouge consumers to the max.

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Travel companies have been doing this shit for years. The most egregious is that Apple users tend to get shown higher prices overall but it's been around in many forms for a long time. They call it "Dynamic Pricing"

I remember Amazon being called out for doing this a few years back (like the early to mid 2010s if I'm recalling correctly). Theirs was particularly ridiculous because you could be on their site logged in, and in an incognito tab logged out, and be seeing different prices reported on the same product pages.

Always shop around for prices in incognito mode.

Dawg... It doesn't do shit.

You browser is finger printed as if you killed JFK...

They know exactly who you are unless you got good opsec and even then

Does that hide the device you are browsing on? I thought it just doesn't save to your history and doesn't share cookies between incognito and non-incognito tabs.

More like fresh browser, default settings, no cookies, no logins no nothing. Just straight to what you're shopping for. Dont change windowsize, position,anything

Or use TOR browser which does all of that by default and more.

I read that even with tor you shouldn't mess with the window as to not make it unique

And some common browsers let you open a top tab, like private browsing, but full tor

This is why I hate booking stuff on a mobile phone. It's quite slow and I have no control over it. On a PC I can more easily compare between sites, check again on another browser if I want, and on and on.

Many people expect a fixed price for most services. Similar to not getting scammed by local taxi drivers in 3rd world countries, you have to be savvy enough to know what prices are actually "deals".

I believe airlines do something similar and I agree it feels very scammy. They will do almost anything to and get someone to pay the maximum they are willing to pay for the same product. I imagine they do this the same way major tech companies like Google provide targeted ads and that is extensive data harvesting and of building a profile around you.

You can possibly protect yourself by using VPNs when making online purchases.

If they're going by user agent, then a VPN won't help. But user agents can be spoofed trivially, especially on a PC. If it's geographical, you could try parking in a place with low average income and look up prices with the browser set to incognito/private.

There is a theory that travel websites use trackers and other information readily available about your device and browser to advertise different prices to different people. A lot of VPN companies use this in their marketing actually— showing different prices for the same airline tickets depending on which VPN server you’re connected to in the world.

I haven’t done much research on this personally, but you may be able to see it in action by opening the same site in a normal and an incognito window and searching for a flight/hotel. Or trying the aforementioned VPN trick. There however doesn’t seem to be any specific rhyme or reason for it, and no one can say that XYZ browser connected to ABC server will get you the cheapest prices. There are just way too many variables in play and these kinds of algorithms the websites use are all well-guarded secrets.

VPN won't protect from browser finger printing.

It is just a part of a OpSec set up

Explain

https://amiunique.org/

So if I understand correctly, its just the unique cocktail of settings and OS identifiers that mark your print?

So keeoing things default should mask you to some degree, right?

Try it. Put whatever settings you want to default and rerun the scan.

If you don't use hardened browser, you leave a trail that uqniue enough to ID you across web.

Facebook and google have scrypts monitoring your moves on most of the websites.

They sell this info

An uncommon browser setup is also distinctive, though. One thing to do is use something like NoScript to not allow FB, Google etc to run scripts on pages. But how many people do that, like 1%? So it's another data point.

No doubt it has huge benefit as does unlock

Using a few different browser for different uses cases will limit data point and keep clean profiles.

So there is that.

No easy way to do it.

Hardened browser being what, like tor? Cause I thought tor functioned somewhat similarly to a vpn.

Firefox needs to be configured.

Librewolf works

Mullvad browser too
Maybe brave

Tor too limiting for daily use

Do I need addons to do this for firefox, or is it some settings I need to fiddle with?

Not to out my browser lol

If you want to harden Firefox, use ffprofile.com. It makes creating a custom profile very easy, and it should have good defaults. This should provide you with decent privacy and also allows you to remove annoyances like sponsored sites.

Or if you are lazy, use LibreWolf which, as far as I know, basically does just that, but preconfigured for you.

For addons, I would go with: uBlock Origin, CanvasBlocker, Privacy Badger and Decentraleyes.

Finally you can test your setup with Panopticlick.

Deff will need a cocktail of extension.

Ublock privacy badger noscrypt

But people do different combos depending on their needs

However each one makes you make unique, so back got he same problem so can't load up too much nor is it needed.

Can you not set up to change the requested data each time you change sites? Or some other way of altering the print such that you arent the same print each time?

I don't sufficient expertise to answer that tbh

I just know to reduce parameters to limit ability to track. How mechanics would actually work is mystery to me lol

doing my part.jpeg

Any level of answer is appreciated, I hadnt realized I was this detailed trackable without what you commented so far

3 more...

I work for one of the companies in the Priceline group and I can categorically say that this is not something we do. We do differentiate for logged in users vs not logged in and for different levels of our loyalty program. The hotels can change their prices on a whim though and many hotels update their prices multiple times per day depending on availability and other factors so it may just be a weird coincidence (you may be correlating an effect with something that isn’t actually the cause).

I just tried this yesterday and I was still getting different prices for the same hotel on desktop and mobile, it wasn't as bad as when we were on vacation where every single person in the car was seeing a different price for the same search criteria we put in. About 70% of the hotels had the same price yesterday but the other 30% ended up being almost $50 more expensive when I looked on desktop. So I don't think it's a coincidence at all and I actually encourage you to try searching for the same thing on different devices to see what I'm talking about.

We do offer “app exclusive” rates but they are supposed to be labelled as such (this is basically because we save a ton of money when people have our apps installed because we don’t end up paying it all to Google for PPC and can pass on some of the savings).

Are you certain in these conditions that everyone is looking at the exact same property for the same dates, same number of people, all logged in, same level in our loyalty program etc? All sorts of things can trigger different prices but the one thing that absolutely doesn’t is the type of mobile device you are using. We just don’t differentiate between types of mobile devices.

So many things are variable or negotiable, like cars, insurance, car rentals, furniture, mattresses, and houses. I feel like most people get the standard deal but they throw a few people a bone maybe to get good reviews or because the rep likes them.

I think sometimes Karens get a good deal by throwing a fit but you can also just ask, "That's more that I was wanting to spend, can you do $x?" Doesn't hurt to ask.

Feels like I’ve heard of this happening before. Curious what others chime in about it. I haven’t experienced it myself but I don’t travel much these days.

This has been going on forever. Decades ago, it was common to be charged more on travel websites if you were using a Mac then if you were using windows. These days they use a lot more profiling to try to squeeze more money out of the people they think are willing to pay.

I priced airbnbs in Oaxaca then hopped on to a VPN exiting in Brazil and got better prices. Then the next time I tried that I didn't get different pricing.

I remember the days when airbnbs were a cheaper option to hotels, now their service fees have just ruined the site.

I think new amateur speculators have driven up prices too. Honestly I don't fault Mexicans for charging Americans more. It just made me decide I don't need to be a gentrifier. I can stay in the US.