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 did but I didn’t think about it until later so I didn’t check as many stores. I tried it in a new incognito instance to avoid tracking cookies and etc, but I still got the same prices as with wifi. Although at that point they could have already identified me in some way, perhaps looking up only spam and blocking JS* makes me unique enough to identify.
* I did have to unblock the bare minimum needed to see the spam prices, so it’s possible that could have allowed them to track me better as well.