Surveillance pricing makes privacy the thing you pay for

Cory Doctorow’s latest is a clean statement of where consumer surveillance and pricing collide: surveillance pricing charges every customer a different price for the same transaction, keyed to the dossier data brokers hold on them. The mechanism is what makes it a trust story and not just a consumer-rights one. Feed a model everyone’s behavioral data, cluster the customers, and run continuous small experiments to find the maximum markup each segment will tolerate — “theory-free,” as Doctorow puts it. You never have to know why a group pays more; you just observe and weaponize the fact. His example: e-commerce sites charging parents more for a thermometer ordered at 2 a.m.

The reason this belongs in a trust-and-identity log is the second-order move it forces. The whole apparatus runs on the same identity resolution that fraud and KYC systems depend on — stitching a person across devices, sessions, and purchases into one durable, monetizable profile. When the pitch becomes “pay us, or share your data and pay more,” privacy stops being a right and becomes a premium tier, available to whoever can afford it. That’s the framing EFF pushed back on in its letter to the San Francisco supervisors, who stalled a resolution supporting California’s AB-2564 surveillance-pricing ban after the local Chamber of Commerce objected.

The tension worth tracking is the collision between the identity graph as a fraud-fighting tool and the identity graph as a price-discrimination engine — same infrastructure, opposite ends. Regulators are only starting to name it; the California bill is the first with a workable statutory test. Worth watching where it lands.