The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) warned businesses on Wednesday that secretly using personal data to set individualized prices may violate federal law, opening a new front in the affordability fight. The number on your screen increasingly reflects not the marketplace as it is for everyone, but a judgment about you personally, calculated from as much data as a vendor can harvest about your life. Inflation politics, which steers so many of our elections, is collective.
It asks why everything costs all of us more than before. Person-specific pricing adds a more intimate question: Why does it cost me more than you? That is a subtle shift with profound consequences.
It twists affordability from a shared argument about the state of the economy into an individual one about equal treatment, and about the fairness of the system setting the prices. The FTC’s draft enforcement policy says businesses should disclose when a price is personalized, why it differs, and what data informed it. The agency says Congress has not authorized it to ban personalized pricing in all circumstances, although concealed or misleading personalization may violate Section 5 of the FTC Act.
Chairman Andrew Ferguson said shoppers expect the "same price that everyone else sees." That expectation is threatened by an emerging system in which people get different prices from one another, and do not know it. A discount for thee, but not for me. FTC staff have traced the American shift from haggling to affixed price tags to the 1870s, when sellers began labeling goods and doing away with the need to negotiate.
Most goods and services now carry posted prices: a public offer to accept or reject. That gave shoppers a common reference point. They could blame inflation, scarcity, or a merchant’s markup, but the norm meant they generally expected another person, at the same place and time, to see the same number.
Person-specific pricing unsettles that assumption even when it lowers the average price. The debate turns on three practices that are often blurred together. Dynamic pricing responds to supply, demand, or timing, and need not touch personal data at all.
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