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John,
“Surveillance pricing” might be a new term, but here’s how it works: Big Tech wants to scrape your data to charge you a different price based on your personal information. This practice is manipulative, unfair, and will result in discrimination—and it's coming to a store near you. We need lawmakers to ban this exploitative practice. Tell them to protect us from discriminatory surveillance pricing!
TAKE ACTION
This concept might seem far-off, but surveillance pricing has already arrived: Uber has allegedly charged customers with low battery power more for the same rides than people with fully charged phones.1 Surveillance pricing targets and abuses your vulnerabilities for profit, bringing Big Tech greed to every service you use and store you enter.
We can’t trust data-mining companies to handle our personal information responsibly. Meta has admitted to violating the civil rights of users by allowing landlords to choose who sees ads based on the race and ethnicity of the user.2 Surveillance pricing threatens to supercharge that discriminatory online surveillance ecosystem, reinforcing existing socioeconomic inequities.
While retailers are already toying with digital price tags and facial recognition-based surge pricing,3 there’s still time to intervene before our race, gender, shopping history, and what we ate for breakfast decide what we pay at the register. We must stand against surveillance pricing now, before it becomes an entrenched practice. Tell retailers that you won’t buy while they manipulate and spy, and pressure your lawmakers to pass laws to protect us all from this practice!
SIGN THE PETITION
Together,
Jibran, Fight for the Future
Footnotes:
1. Vice: https://www.vice.com/en/article/uber-surge-pricing-phone-battery/
2. Washington Post: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/06/21/facebook-doj-discriminatory-housing-ads/
3. Vice: https://www.vice.com/en/article/surge-pricing-facial-recognition-surveillance-grocery-stores/
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