A new law will ban retailers from using shoppers’ personal data to hike grocery prices—but consumer advocates warn it contains loopholes that companies could exploit.
More states really need to get on board with this
I’m happy to see the first state do this, hopefully we can get the ball rolling on more.
Companies just have way too much data about people.
It should be illegal to store/compile data that isn’t directly related to the good, services or products that you’re offering.
We’re getting to the point where everything about you, down to your real-time location, is available to anyone with enough money. That’s just not a power that we should allow to go unregulated.
We really need a non profit that buys data on politicians and Billionaires and then just make an app for people to follow them around and harass them to get this banned.
This guy has the right idea:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ElonJet
Though his posts on Twitter have a 24h delay due to their change in community guidelines.
You can get live information from their website: https://grndcntrl.net/
Why only for groceries?
In the interest of keeping markets fair, it should be illegal across the board to change prices depending on who the customer is*. The price is the price, as it should be in a free and fair market.
*Though I think I’d still allow for rewards/loyalty card programs and coupons given to frequent customers and that sort of thing – with the distinction being it’s something that the customer explicitly opts in to. And a restriction that these programs can only ever lower prices, never raise them.
Don’t let perfection be the enemy of good. Keep pushing for better consumer protections.
I actually would like to prevent loyalty card programs from lowering your price. Just call it a sale.
They want to harvest your data and sell it. And you know as sure fuck they aren’t going to shit to protect it.
They want to harvest your data and sell it.
Well, yes. But they’re doing this anyway. If you’re paying with a card (and most people do), they’re using your credit card number as an identifier to track you across all the purchases you made across all their stores. These days, they may also be using facial recognition for the same purpose, to even catch the people paying with cash. Making rewards program memberships and the like illegal would barely slow down their data collection at all.
It may not slow down the data collection much, other than perhaps people using different cards at different times, but if you aren’t in a loyalty program, the only place they could market specifically to you would be at the checkout.
Unless I guess they are upfront about facial recognition and have screens in store… which just sounds awful.
Rewards programs are also a scam, in a way. The company isn’t giving shit away for free, not these big corporations who run those things. Either you’re paying for it and getting your own money back, or other customers are paying for it. All so they can get a monopoly on your wallet.
Well, you (and everyone else) are paying for it through retail markups and profit margins … but you’re going to be paying that anyway under capitalism.
What the store gets out of it is:
A) They hope their rewards program will motivate you to shop at their store, rather than going to any competitor’s, since you have a rewards card for their store and hopefully not the others. So the rewards program could increase their market share a bit, at the cost of a few discounts.
B) They’re using it to track you, of course. It provides more analytics for them to further optimize selling you shit, and they might also be selling the data to 3rd parties.
Step by step it will get there. This needs to be told to whoever got this to happen! And also to improve this
Step by step is the typical weak Democrat policy. They make tiny incremental changes that are so small that nobody will ever notice. The Democratic party needs to pass legislation that is not afraid of making changes because big changes are needed desperately.
Canada needs this. Also either a full fucking ban on the remote-updated epaper price tags, or at the least very strict rules on when they can be updated (i.e. once a day before opening or after closing to the public)
And 24 hour stores can update their prices at midnight, but the lower of the two prices is still effective for the first 2 hours, in case anyone was actively shopping during the change.
You… eh… what?
How is this even a thing? What kind of hellhole do you poor us-americans live in?
Yeah dog, is not just our government… Well, I guess this is because of the lack of a government for the people. But yeah for more than a few years shopping for groceries has become where do you personally get the lowest prices. I get different discounts from my partner.
We now shop at a store that doesn’t play this type of game but many people live in an area that only contains stores like this.
I await the inevitable Republican backed federal law that preempts state laws and makes it legal except under a very narrow case that somehow would be beneficial to consumers.
We must do it.
For the children.
No sales tax on groceries purchased with tips
Im amazed that that would happen in the USA.
Let’s ban other theoretical concepts as well! /s The simple solution is to bring back cost accounting and make it transparent. A system where everything needs to be kept secret to fleece the masses is not a system I’d want to support in my country (but look…here we are).
I live in MD. I dont know how this affects me since I dont mobile order anything, but the precedent sounds good to set
These include electronic shelf labels, which advocates have warned could allow companies to instantly change grocery prices based on the time of day, weather, and other factors that influence consumer demand.
“Digital price tags are replacing paper ones. It’s happening because we are having cameras that are watching aisles, it’s happening because we have apps that are moving from search-based to predictive,”
You are not immune.
Who wrote the law in the first place? That should tell you enough.
Is this just for online orders? Or how do they get my data if I’d just walk into the store without using their app and paying cash? Facial recognition? If so that’s very dystopian.
Potentially face recognition, but primarily through the signals your phone outputs, like WiFi and Bluetooth signals.
A lot of stores here in the UK already employ facial recognition if you walk in.
It stops known shoplifters throughout stores (so if you shoplifted in a Nottingham Tesco’s, be prepared to be banned from Sainsbury’s in Swansea), but it also tracks your shopping so it’s being sold as a convenience feature - you walk up to a till and it already knows what’s in your basket and how much you need to pay.
Oh and while you walk through the stores, you get targeted advettisements that’s already connected to your online identity. You looked up symptoms of PCOS? Have fun being blasted with hair removal product ads throughout your shopping.
It’s pretty fucking dystopian, yes. My local corner shop doesn’t need to know my shopping habits. It won’t sell me more milk or bread. And I won’t be buying that new type of chicken nuggies no matter how hard they try to sell it. I’m perfectly happy with what I want to buy, I don’t need or want optimised ads.
so if you shoplifted in a Nottingham Tesco’s, be prepared to be banned from Sainsbury’s in Swansea
This got a genuine chuckle from me, I love a bit of good writing in the wild!
there is a woman here, in a country town, who was banned from EVERY shop in town because she was a serial shoplifter. https://www.9news.com.au/national/shoplifter-banned-from-entering-every-gunnedah-retail-store-a-current-affair/6872ca17-b120-4482-9de4-3f78bdaf4060
I was in a small town in Maine that did that informally, there were a handful of shops and a ban at one store was applied everywhere. They all had signs warning about the policy. It was apparently very effective.
