this post was submitted on 14 Aug 2024
1369 points (98.8% liked)
A Boring Dystopia
9721 readers
149 users here now
Pictures, Videos, Articles showing just how boring it is to live in a dystopic society, or with signs of a dystopic society.
Rules (Subject to Change)
--Be a Decent Human Being
--Posting news articles: include the source name and exact title from article in your post title
--Posts must have something to do with the topic
--Zero tolerance for Racism/Sexism/Ableism/etc.
--No NSFW content
--Abide by the rules of lemmy.world
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
How do they know what my income is?
If you aren't 100% committed to data privacy all the time, which is damn hard to do and live in society, they could probably tell how many pimples you have on your ass and charge accordingly.
Seven pimples detected applying surge pricing to pimple cream
No not my ass pimple cream
Even if you were 100% perfectly committed, there would be all sorts of little signals and things that would leak out enough for them to adjust pricing accordingly. The kind of clothes you're wearing, the time of day you're shopping at, your gait, expression, etc.
Even if you were able to perfectly exclude all information about you, it's possible to gather data from the hole that you leave behind. You aren't leaving data behind like a lot of other customers, so that would probably make you either old, or privacy-inclined. You're not buying the same things as an old person, so you're not old, and you can pick it up from there.
Area code is best predictor for income, followed by grocery store habits.
If you post your order through an app or a website where you log in first, then it's not so hard for them to get financial information on you. That's why I strongly recommend against using, for example, the McDonald's app. Because they can do price fixing and you will never see it. Of course this is about grocery stores, so it takes a little more effort, but remember that they already have member cards, so all they need is a way to link those member cards to more data, and they can buy that data easily enough.
In other words, the data is already there for the taking. The question is how exactly the scam will unfold. It's going to unfold, but what will the details be? Pay attention, because it's going to happen or already is happening to you or people around you.
Wow. This is something I knew to be true, just never thought too deep about it. This is how you make people care about privacy, get their money involved. It definitely made me sit up straighter.
If they ever enforce using an app for grocery shopping, I will just starve out of spite.
Because they can pay 10 million to a consulting firm to develop a customer-profiling model that predicts their income based on the most recent purchases with a 10% margin of error.
So if someone only buys cheap stuff and not much, they will be considered less wealthy even though they could be a millionaire.
I know, I know, statistically it will be alright and that's what counts in the end from the business perspective.
If a bank or a CC company scans your face for whatever reason and then shares that info like they do with credit scores by default today - your data will be available on the marketplace
You'd probably be surprised and scared if you knew what companies know about you.
Because credit card companies and banks sell that info. Other aggregate that based on cookies and other user info.
Most places don't need to know your specific income, just that you're living in X area and are making 150-200k, etc.