So we took a family vacation recently and we had to drive halfway across America and what creeped me the fuck out was how we were getting such different prices on different phones while looking at the same hotel room on Priceline. For example I would look for a hotel in Chicago and find a room for a $180, then my cousin is also looking for a room on his phone and I look over and the same hotel room is $50-$70 cheaper. This kept on happening in every city we went to, like there was such a huge fluctuation between the prices one person would get on their phone and what someone else was getting. We noticed that the people with higher end Samsung phones were getting a much lower rate than those with cheaper phones. Have you ever experienced such price discrimination and is there really anyway to protect yourself from it? And do you think it’s ethical for companies to charge different rates for the same product? Should there be some legislation to protect consumers from this seeing as how AI is just going to make it easier for companies to price gouge consumers to the max.

  • 2Xtreme21@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    There is a theory that travel websites use trackers and other information readily available about your device and browser to advertise different prices to different people. A lot of VPN companies use this in their marketing actually— showing different prices for the same airline tickets depending on which VPN server you’re connected to in the world.

    I haven’t done much research on this personally, but you may be able to see it in action by opening the same site in a normal and an incognito window and searching for a flight/hotel. Or trying the aforementioned VPN trick. There however doesn’t seem to be any specific rhyme or reason for it, and no one can say that XYZ browser connected to ABC server will get you the cheapest prices. There are just way too many variables in play and these kinds of algorithms the websites use are all well-guarded secrets.

      • 2Xtreme21@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        You’re right- theory probably wasn’t the best word. It is known that companies do this but it’s impossible to concretely say how and in what circumstances prices change.

        • sadreality@kbin.social
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          1 year ago

          If you don’t use hardened browser, you leave a trail that uqniue enough to ID you across web.

          Facebook and google have scrypts monitoring your moves on most of the websites.

          They sell this info

          • squiblet@kbin.social
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            1 year ago

            An uncommon browser setup is also distinctive, though. One thing to do is use something like NoScript to not allow FB, Google etc to run scripts on pages. But how many people do that, like 1%? So it’s another data point.

            • sadreality@kbin.social
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              1 year ago

              No doubt it has huge benefit as does unlock

              Using a few different browser for different uses cases will limit data point and keep clean profiles.

              So there is that.

              No easy way to do it.

            • sadreality@kbin.social
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              1 year ago

              Firefox needs to be configured.

              Librewolf works

              Mullvad browser too
              Maybe brave

              Tor too limiting for daily use

                • melooone@feddit.de
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                  1 year ago

                  If you want to harden Firefox, use ffprofile.com. It makes creating a custom profile very easy, and it should have good defaults. This should provide you with decent privacy and also allows you to remove annoyances like sponsored sites.

                  Or if you are lazy, use LibreWolf which, as far as I know, basically does just that, but preconfigured for you.

                  For addons, I would go with: uBlock Origin, CanvasBlocker, Privacy Badger and Decentraleyes.

                  Finally you can test your setup with Panopticlick.

                • sadreality@kbin.social
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                  1 year ago

                  Deff will need a cocktail of extension.

                  Ublock privacy badger noscrypt

                  But people do different combos depending on their needs

                  However each one makes you make unique, so back got he same problem so can’t load up too much nor is it needed.

                  • wildginger@lemmy.myserv.one
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                    1 year ago

                    Can you not set up to change the requested data each time you change sites? Or some other way of altering the print such that you arent the same print each time?