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You can have privacy and an institution can collect data.

HIPAA is an example of that.

All personal data should be treated with at or near HIPAA levels of security. If I give my personal information to my bank, or google, that's fine for them to look at it, but it's not ok if that information magically lands in the hands of Coca Cola for marketing.

> This is simply untenable. Institutions of all kinds have been keeping records connected to individuals for millennia.

This is the reason privacy is needed.

> Try to run a school when you can’t maintain data on the students.

Yes, we should try this. Zero-knowledge proofs and other modern technology allows for this. Even the first step of not selling or using student data for commerce is an easy step.

Those who think that we should not try to improve because our privacy is already compromised, should step aside.

It's not - GDPR does that and it could even be much stricter still and we'd be fine.

We already have laws that abridge the freedom of speech, so it's not absolute.

What's special about slander that we can have a say "you're not allowed to make defamatory false statements about people," but we couldn't have "you're not allowed to spy on people and sell information about them"?

Granted slander is a civil and not criminal matter, but if I could sue companies for sharing personal information about me that would still be something.

I am not convinced mortgages is a net benefit to the society in any way.

It's not impossible. It just raises risk and thus borrowing rates to compensate. That has a dragging effect on the economy and brings up an important question: Are there rights we're willing to give up for money? For a lot of people, perhaps yourself the answer is yes. For others there's no price on their rights - they're not for sale.

And?

Good points, but there should be partial solutions. For example, you can present data about the consumer in order to decide on the mortgage, but once the transaction is complete, the data should disappear. You need something akin to "the data can be used only for the particular purpose of the transaction at hand, and the data must be wholly necessary for the transaction at hand."

We also know that mortgage lenders use irrelevant---well, scratch that---protected data to make decisions (i.e. discriminatory). Race for example is not supposed to be used in lending decisions.

Fraud detection can probably be solved by other reasonable means. And in any case, if you take the fraud argument to the limit, then you'd end up advocating for constant surveillance to prevent fraud. Equifax, Experian, and Transunion are all horrible companies who do their ostensible job minimally well, while maximizing the exploitation of the data of the people.

No it won't.

See? I can make unsubstantiated sweeping claims too.

The other framing of this is: how much money are you willing to sell your rights for?

Well, no, its the law that contains the educational parallel to the privacy and rights of record access parts (but not the rest) of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) of 1996.

Aside from the wrong acronym, the privacy and access rights are the central focus of FERPA, but pretty far down the list for HIPAA, despite being what many people think it is centrally about—which is why both “rights” and “privacy” are in the name of FERPA but (despite the joke about the common error in the acronym that “the second P in HIPAA is for Privacy”) neither is in the name of HIPAA.

Nothing that person said was about removing ads.

There's plenty of other laws that limit the choices of the poor for their own good. You can't just build a lean-to slum, you can't buy swill milk.

one only needs to open a history book to see that this country used to be much, much more corrupt. while this country has problems, we are far from the first generation to face them.

> until violating the said constitution actually has enforceable consequences it’s not more than a paper tiger. [...] Take for instance the 2nd amendment.

That seems like an exceptionally tepid constitutional violation to pick, after the last several years of massively-worse and flagrant violations.

Are you offering it because you think it represents something typical, and current events will prove to be an extreme outlier?

Once people manage to bypass the 2nd Amendment, the next one to go will be free speech.

> The gun lobby’s interpretation of the Second Amendment is one of the greatest pieces of fraud, I repeat the work fraud, on the American people by special interest groups that I have seen in my lifetime. The real purpose of the Second Amendment was to ensure that state armies—the militia—would be maintained for the defense of the state. The very language of the Second Amendment refutes any argument that it was intended to guarantee every citizen an unfettered right to any kind of weapon he or she desires.

Sounds like you have been a victim of fraud. At least according to a former Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court. To prevent more people falling prey to fraudsters, Justice Stevens recommends that this amendment should be repealed - https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/27/opinion/john-paul-stevens...

> It can never be better for consumers. The only way a business would adopt this practice is if it leads to greater revenues. On average, that necessarily means worse prices for the average consumer.

That depends on the distribution of consumer incomes. Price discrimination (charging people more who can afford more) can be good for low-income customers.

>It can never be better for consumers. The only way a business would adopt this practice is if it leads to greater revenues. On average, that necessarily means worse prices for the average consumer.

Not necessarily. Look at airlines for example, which make heavy use of price discrimination. This allows them to offer a lower economy price to people who have less money, while subsidizing the flight by charging a higher price to business or luxury travelers.

If they were only allowed to offer one type of ticket at one price, it would mostly benefit richer passengers while pricing the poorest passengers out of air travel.

In the end this made news about how the surveillance economy works and should further freak people out about it. This helps long term I think.

If you take charging higher grocery prices for richer people to its furthest point, you could end up with a system where every item costs Y% of their assets and the utility of a dollar is reduced the more you have. In effect, this would eliminate the relative value of having more money. For example, eggs could be priced at 0.02% of total assets, which means a poorer person with $2000 pays 40 cents, and a richer person with $1M pays $200.

Now, would this go to its furthest point? Probably not, but it has the same, but smaller, effect of reducing the utility of money for richer people.

In some scenarios, this actually might make sense. For example, in Finland, they use the day fine system where traffic ticket fines are based on the violator's daily disposable income. It's useful because this is a scenario where you want the punishment to feel equivalent to all income levels.

For groceries, I don't think this should apply, because I think we would not want the act of purchasing food to equally punish all levels of wealth.

This really becomes a philosophical discussion of defining price gouging and immoral market techniques. Some are clearly gouging, such as charging 2x plane fares for someone who has to fly to a funeral, or tripling the price of supplies after a natural disaster. Some are less clear.

> If I'm selling to the wealthiest zip code, where the median house price is over $10M, should I be disallowed to charge higher prices?

I think so, because perhaps your costs to distribute those products is more too. But what I don't think you should be able to do is say, well your house was $50mm and your house was $1mm so you pay much more. Or you're wearing Air Force Ones so maybe your price is just a little more wink wink. It's a bit like hyper-targeted advertising versus general advertising.

> If I'm posting something for sale on Craigslist, and I don't put a price, is it OK if I quote different prices to different people who text me?

I think so as well. I don't see a problem with this - you don't know anything (maybe besides a green/blue text) anything about the buyer, how much they make, &c.

Not comparable. The markets can still charge wherever they want, but it needs to be priced per item and not per customer. In your house counterexample, you could set whatever list price you want.

> If I'm selling to the wealthiest zip code, where the median house price is over $10M, should I be disallowed to charge higher prices?

Yes, you should be disallowed. Otherwise every online store will upcharge you based on IP. There can be exceptions for small businesses or individuals, but that's it.

> airlines charge more if you're too large to fit your seat

I don't think this is a good example, because you're literally using more of the product that's being sold. I get where you're coming from but this one doesn't seem to really reinforce the point you are trying to make. It's like selling by weight or something if you wanted to compare it to groceries.

There is charging more because your costs are higher (most of your examples), then there is charging more because of opportunism. Insurance is customized because the costs are higher. That's fine.

Taking advantage of your personal circumstances that is unrelated to cost to charge you more--especially when it is hidden from you--is what is bad and should be illegal.

Sometimes you get coupons mailed on your behavior. There is a story out there that Target has(had?) a pregnancy prediction score, and acted on that to send you coupons: https://verdict.justia.com/2012/02/28/should-target-tell-you...

I buy "pickup" orders online all the time through the store's app where you can also buy instacart delivery. It's still shopping online but there's no additional cost nor tip for ordering pickup.

Kroger's delivery service wasn't that bad at all, it was fantastic actually.

Of course, some things are too good to be true, they apparently lost hundreds of millions of dollars on the effort before closing it down earlier this year. At least they did in my area in January, my understanding is they ended it everywhere they didn't have a physical store presence.

Is that assuming Instacart/DoorDash? Click and collect or even delivery from grocery stores isn't nearly that bad, right? I thought it was pretty competitive.

For a lot of people their time and their effort is worth more to them than their money unless it is something they particularly enjoy doing themselves.

Actually, why even limit what it applies to

from the bill:

> “Algorithmic-based price discrimination” does not include:

> 5. The covered retailer offers a discounted price on equal terms to one of the following groups of consumers:

> c. Members, enrollees, or participants in a loyalty, membership, including cooperative memberships, or rewards program [...]

Isn't the entire system of parking enforcement based on surveillance?

No, an AI running on your phone will do it. That's how the stores are setting their prices. Fight fire with fire.

That's not as good as auditing the books of grocers, but it's better than permitting surveillance pricing.

There are only 2 divisions in the constitution, federal and state. Everything further down is not covered. States are allowed to rule over counties and cities absolutely, and can even dissolve them entirely.

I like it: a philosophical take.

What I would say is: "I assume that people who don't put the same value on the principle of self-sufficiency that I do would support a scheme to allow people of lesser means to buy groceries on the open market at a lower price than is permitted to me."

>nothing about this makes sense

You are underestimating how much they want to take from the rich to subsidize others. They want to do this so much that they just implemented an unconstitutional income tax against the rich. As long as it's only rich people getting price gauged I do not think they would lose any sleep.