All of this can be merged into a single file that you have no right to scrutinize, let alone redact. Biden's Consumer Finance Protection Bureau passed a rule banning all this shit, but Trump illegally killed off that rule:

pluralistic.net/2025/05/15/ass…

Capitalism's highest form of creativity is finding ways to rip you off, and the business world's most creative minds have found a million ways to exploit this data, including surveillance pricing.

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For example, McDonald's has invested in a startup called Plexure that offers to help restaurants jack up prices on payday, when you can afford to pay more:

pluralistic.net/2024/06/05/you…

And then there's the Big Three "Uber for nurses" apps, who use surveillance data to calculate wages for nurses, offering lower hourly rates to nurses who are carrying a lot of credit-card debt, on the grounds that they are too desperate to turn down a lowball offer:

pluralistic.net/2024/12/18/loo…

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And just as these gigwork apps are deciding what your labor is worth, surveillance pricing systems decide what your *money* is worth, charging you more than another otherwise identical customer, for an identical product, meaning your dollar is worth less than that other customer's dollar:

pluralistic.net/2025/06/24/pri…

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Now we have Delta, which promises to do the same thing, but for plane tickets. Obviously, the aviation industry has long practiced a form of "price discrimination," charging radically different sums for the same seat, based on when you buy the ticket, or when you plan to return.

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But this is different, and to explain why, here's a link to an article by the great Hubert Horan, who may be best known to my readers for his incredible breakdowns of Uber's finances, but whose life's work is as an aviation analyst:

nakedcapitalism.com/2025/07/hu…

Horan draws a distinction between surveillance pricing and "second degree price discrimination." Surveillance pricing targets you, personally, based on your personal information.

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"Second degree price discrimination" charges everyone *like* you the same price: like, everyone who buys a roundtrip ticket without a Saturday night stay is charged extra on the grounds that they are probably a price-insensitive business traveler whose fare is being paid by a corporation.

Surveillance pricing is *first*-degree price discrimination, with every customer seeing a different price.

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Horan argues that second-degree discrimination created efficiencies, for example, by offering cheap last-minute seats to people thinking about going away for the weekend, who fill seats that would otherwise go empty. Horan says these efficiencies have tapped out, thanks to the application of straightforward pricing algorithms to tickets.

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Now, Delta wants to squeeze more profits out of price discrimination, but by employing first-degree discrimination, they're doing so without any benefit to fliers (unlike second-degree discrimination, which made many fliers better off because they were able to score cheaper tickets). This makes Delta's surveillance pricing a "pure transfer" - shifting wealth from fliers to shareholders with no benefit to those fliers.

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Delta is doing this in partnership with an Israeli firm called Fetcherr, whose sales pitch denies that they are using surveillance data to price tickets, despite what Delta has claimed.

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