Waddid I tell ya?

On several occasions I have raised questions about companies' gathering of personal customer data, saying I don't believe their crap about how it's all for our benefit and how it provides a "personalized shopping experience." Well, it turns out that while the first part is still crap, the second part allows for let's call it a creative interpretation. This is from AP for Tuesday:

Most American consumers don't realize Internet merchants and even traditional retailers sometimes charge different prices to different customers for the same products, according to a new survey.

The study, "Open to Exploitation," found nearly two-thirds of adult Internet users believed incorrectly it was illegal to charge different people different prices, a practice retailers call "price customization." More than two-thirds of people surveyed also said they believed online travel sites are required by law to offer the lowest airline prices possible.

The study, by the Annenberg Public Policy Center, also found that the vast majority of people objected to the practice even as they were unaware it was going on.

The point here is how do the companies pull this off? One way is those "customer loyalty cards," the ones that supposedly don't create a file on you but actually do. Another is that the internet

enables businesses to quietly collect detailed records about a customer's behavior and preferences and set prices accordingly. ...

[Researcher Joseph] Turow found a retail photography Web site charging different prices for the same digital cameras and related equipment depending on whether shoppers had previously visited popular price-comparison sites.

Which just serves to confirm what has been (or at least should have been) well-known: Unless you take steps to avoid it, you are being followed everywhere you go online, watched as you visit every website, click on every ad, go toe very link, make every purchase, conduct any business. When it comes to the internet, Big Brother is already here, but it's not the government doing the snooping. Big Brother is Big Business.

By the way, we are daily bombarded with ads that declare "Get you best price, then come here!" Or "Go ahead, shop around!" We are encouraged by ads to do comparison shopping. They drip with breathless respect for "today's sophisticated shopper." But would you care to know what businesses actually think of people who follow their (supposed) advice? "Bottom feeders." That's what the ad industry calls them. "Bottom feeders." And they are unwanted:

Stores aggressively try to retain loyal customers who generate the highest sales while discouraging bargain-hunter shoppers who are less profitable because they check many sites for the same product at the lowest price.

The net result is that the more you comparison shop online, the less likely you are to find bargains. Because Big Business Brother is watching.

Footnote: There are a number of freeware programs that can detect tracking programs on your computer. Used in tandem, they can be pretty effective in holding down the amount of information about your web habits that otherwise can be spewed all over cyberspace. While not the only ones by any means, the ones I use are Ad-Aware, Spybot - Search & Destroy, and Spyware Doctor. (The latter has limited functions in the freeware version.)