Most of the things you interact with online are tracking your location, your device type, and your digital footprint to predict exactly how desperate you are to buy something. If the algorithm thinks you have money, or simply lack options, it alters the price in real-time.
To prove how widespread “surveillance pricing” has become, I decided to see if I could outsmart it. This involved exploiting corporate registry loopholes to create a fake corporate entity, hiring an improv actor off Craigslist to establish a completely separate digital identity, and strapping a burner phone to a drone to make purchases from the airspace above the wealthiest gated community in Minnesota.
I’d also like to know. Sellers can know when you’re using a popular VPN service or have DeGoogled, but I don’t know how they may use that information. Perhaps they’ll try to punish you into submission by jacking prices to the moon or refusing to serve their website altogether. Reddit and some other sites already block VPNs.
There will never be a silver bullet, because this will be an endless arms race between sellers and savvy consumers.