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Just Ban Surveillance Pricing Already

Companies are using our data to gouge us. How much more can consumers take?

People hate being surveilled, taken advantage of, or treated differently than their peers. Surveillance pricing—the individualized, algorithmic practice of charging one person more than another based on data harvested from them—hits the trifecta. Governments ought to ban the practice. It’s insane we must even debate the question.

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The New Democratic Party has been on the case of late throughout the country—both nationally and sub-nationally. Manitoba led the charge, introducing a bill to restrict algorithmic pricing in March. The Ontario NDP, under leader Marit Stiles, followed suit. So too did the federal party under new leader Avi Lewis, who called surveillance pricing “creepy” as his party introduced a motion in Parliament to ban it.

Lewis’s anti-snitch pricing advocacy put the issue on the national agenda, boosting provincial efforts that, in turn, helped make the federal case. Now, if you’ll pardon the pun, all eyes are on the matter.

Spying on people to rip them off is bad. Ontario premier Doug Ford prefers to call it capitalism and the free........

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