If you’re near Rochester, New York, the price for a carton of Target’s Good & Gather eggs is listed as $1.99 on its website. If you’re in Manhattan’s upscale Tribeca neighborhood, that price changes to $2.29. It’s unclear why the prices differ, but a new notice on Target’s website offers a potential hint: “This price was set by an algorithm using your personal data.”
A recently enacted New York State law requires businesses that algorithmically set prices using customers’ personal data to disclose that. According to the law, personal data includes any data that can be “linked or reasonably linked, directly or indirectly, with a specific consumer or device.” The law doesn’t require businesses to explicitly state what information about a person or device is being used or how each piece of information affects the final price a customer sees. The law includes a carve-out for the use of location data strictly to calculate cab or rideshare fares based on mileage and trip duration but not for other purposes.
The law also requires that the disclosure is “clear and conspicuous.” Target’s disclosure is not the easiest to find–a customer would have to know to click the “i” icon next to the price of an item, then scroll to the bottom of the pop-up. In the past, the courts have held that it’s not always reasonable to assume that a customer will click on “more information” links when it’s not required.
Oregon has had a law on the books for decades that grocers need to price everything the same within a given region. This is part of how grocery circulars are practical. The added expense of printing a different flyer for each store (and then working with the paper to zone correctly, but single-copy is still going to be an issue) negated the increased income from store-to-store pricing that allowed for high margins in some cases.
I don’t remember the last time I looked at a grocery ad – wait, no, I do … it was May 2023 – so this is of less relevance as we transition to apps, but this doesn’t really seem to be about collecting personal data so much as “prices vary geographically,” which isn’t really news.