How CCTV Prices Are Making Your Life More Expensive (and What to Do About It)
Shopping has always been a battle. Companies work hard to convince you that their product is better, while trying to ensure that you pay the highest possible price for your purchase. It’s fair enough, and most of us are used to researching everything we buy to make sure we ‘re not being ripped off .
But modern technology has changed the game. Companies have been collecting information about us for years, which means they have a pretty good idea of our shopping habits , including how much we’re willing to pay for certain products and services, called Individualized Consumer Data (ICD). New tools like artificial intelligence are now making it much, much easier for companies to engage in what’s called surveillance pricing .
What is the pricing in the surveillance industry?
In its simplest sense, observational pricing is when companies profile you and your buying habits, and then adjust their prices specifically for you. A simple example is buying a TV: Two people go to Amazon to look at the same TV. One person sees a price of $499 and the other sees a price of $599 for the same TV, at the same time. The discrepancy arises because of their different spending habits and other information Amazon has collected about them — their ICD — which tells the company that one person is willing to spend that extra $100 and the other is not.
Companies create these profiles by collecting an incredible amount of information about you from a variety of sources. Internet cookies, your shopping history, your IP address (and the geographic and demographic information it provides) are just the basics, but profiling goes much deeper. Even behavior, like how far you scroll when searching for products or what you leave in your shopping cart and never buy, contributes to a detailed picture of who you are as a consumer.
You might think that most of your personal and financial information is protected to some extent by privacy laws and policies, and you’re right. Much of it is anonymous. But the vast amount of information you lose when you go online—not just cookies and IP addresses, but also the browser you use, the plug-ins you’ve installed, your time zone, screen size, devices, and even the system fonts on your computer—can be collected to create a detailed “fingerprint” of your online life.
Combined with data collected from loyalty apps and other sources, this means that an “anonymous” profile of you can be reliably created and identified. In other words, companies may not know that you are the one buying that TV, but they know that it is being bought by a unique consumer with specific habits, and so they can very effectively adjust their prices as needed.
Signs to look out for
The funny thing about tracking pricing is how hard it is to tell that it’s happening. After all, you go to a site to buy something, you see a price, you assume it’s just a calculated price. How can you know that someone else will see a higher or lower price?
It’s not easy. You can look for a few subtle signs and try a few experiments if you suspect you’re experiencing surveillance pricing:
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Changed prices: If you regularly visit a particular website and notice that the price changes, it could be because you are using a different device or some other aspect of your online footprint has changed. Or it could be because your ICD is telling the company that you are always visiting it multiple times in search of a lower price.
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Inconsistent pricing: If you know someone who buys the same item on the same platform and they get different prices, that’s a potential clue.
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Reactive advertising. Even if you haven’t noticed a price change, seeing ads that are highly targeted at you can be a sign that ICD is being collected and used against you. For example, if web searches or comments on your social media feeds seem to inspire related advertising, there’s a good chance your online footprint is specific enough to be used for surveillance pricing.
Protection from pricing in the field of supervision
Surveillance pricing hurts consumers because it means you end up paying more for goods simply because of where you live or other external factors – it’s inherently unfair. However, it can be difficult to defend against – there are basically four strategies you can use to combat surveillance pricing, and none of them are a magic bullet.
Compare Stores
The easiest way to combat perceived surveillance pricing is to inspect products in different stores, including physical ones if possible, to get a clear idea of what the “normal” price should be. This can be time-consuming and not always effective, as different online platforms may use similar surveillance methods against you.
Another aspect of this is to involve friends and family who live in different areas and use different devices (like Android phones and iPhones). A news station recently asked several people from around the country to check prices on different products online and found that prices varied by several hundred dollars depending on location and other factors. If you can ask people who live in different areas to check prices, you can at least determine whether you’re getting a fair deal by comparison.
Use a VPN
One of the most common pieces of advice when pricing issues arise is to use a virtual private network (VPN) to mask your location—you’ve probably seen this advice in connection with finding the cheapest airfare. It seems to make sense: if retailers are charging more to people living in wealthy zip codes, changing your reported location should protect against that.
I tried this by using a VPN to change my IP address to locations in Mexico, the Netherlands, Japan, and various areas of the US, and didn’t really see any change in price . One reason this might not work is that your IP address and the location associated with it are just part of your online fingerprint, and companies can still track you when you mask it (your browser gives away a lot of information – you can see how much on this site ). Another reason this might not work as well as you’d expect is that companies can tell pretty easily that you’re using a VPN, because the IP addresses they assign to their users are used over and over again, often by multiple people at the same time. This creates patterns that allow companies to flag those IP addresses as VPNs.
However, that doesn’t mean that using a VPN is useless in the fight against surveillance. If you regularly surf the web through a VPN and combine it with other steps like browsing in incognito mode , regularly clearing your browser cookies, and deleting your internet history, you’ll be depriving trackers of a lot of information about you that can help hide your identity by making it harder to create that online fingerprint.
Avoid loyalty apps
Loyalty apps that offer coupons and discounts to regular shoppers are, of course, data vacuums that make it all too easy to build a profile of you and your shopping habits. For a few measly discounts, you’re essentially giving companies everything they could possibly need to track and profile you, and they can (and do) sell that information to other retailers. If you want to make it harder for them to use surveillance pricing against you, giving up those little perks is probably necessary.
Use different devices
This last tip for combating CCTV prices is the only one that actually made a difference when I tested it. I randomly searched for a 65-inch TCL TV on Amazon. In my desktop browser, it was listed for $469.95. When I switched to my phone, it was suddenly listed for $479.00. Less than $10 isn’t a huge difference, but switching devices was the only strategy that got me any results at all, showing that checking prices across devices is an effective strategy for ensuring you’re getting the best price possible, despite what your profile might say about your shopping habits.
Of course, all this checking and device swapping takes time and effort, so you should consider whether the money you can save by bypassing the cost of surveillance is worth the time you spend doing it. Regularly using a VPN with an incognito browser is probably the best passive strategy you can use to thwart attempts to profile you without turning it into a second job.
Last year, the Federal Trade Commission launched an investigation into surveillance pricing that could lead to new regulations and crackdowns on the practice, and several states are working on some form of legislation to regulate or ban the practice. But until that happens, keep your eyes open.