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.
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.