Privacy

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A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.

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Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
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If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
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📺 How I Tricked Big Tech’s AI Pricing Algorithms to Save $8,793 (youtu.be)

submitted 1 day ago by davel@lemmy.ml to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

24 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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.

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[–] 0_o7@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 points 12 hours ago (1 children)

Did you try checking while using data on your phone?

Using different network might give varying results.

[–] Lumelore@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 points 12 hours ago* (last edited 12 hours ago)

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.