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jrochkind1 19 hours ago [-]
> Republican Rep. Chris Richardson, an Elbert County Republican, argued that the bill is too broad and could regulate standard analytic usage in the workplace, such as a human resources software that recommends a pay band for employees based on performance.
He does not think this is is just selling it further? Oh no, it might prohibit software automatically determining my wages, how could we even have a society if we don't let computers figure out the least they can pay me without me quitting.
Balgair 1 hours ago [-]
Oh man the Colorado GOP is a complete mess these days.
Edit: He withdrew this morning and is running for the GOP chair now.
Bobert is quiet these days but I'm sure she'll ramp up after her primary closes.
The various school boards are perennial sources of my idiocy. My (former) board would go into public meetings and just openly and freely admit to crimes.
The county commissioners in DougCo recently decided to fine the victims of shoplifting from r not reporting it. No, you didn't read that wrong.
So, in summary, the GOP and many, but not all, of their state level membership aren't really sending their best these days.
thegreatpeter 17 hours ago [-]
“I absolutely agree that consumers and wage earners should not be exploited by the use of their data,” he said. “But it’s still overly broad and it’s still overly vague in very important parts. And I believe it’s overly simplistic in its definition of wage setting.”
kelnos 12 hours ago [-]
That's standard conservative speak for "don't interfere with business practices". "Overly broad" is just a way to shut down discussion.
adestefan 10 hours ago [-]
That’s juicy coming from the current Republican Party.
tzs 15 hours ago [-]
How do you get from "pay band [...] based on performance" to "least they can pay me without quitting"?
cobertos 14 hours ago [-]
Why would corporate software be incentivized to recommend a pay band any higher than the least the employee would take? The incentives are not aligned
tzs 7 minutes ago [-]
Choosing a pay band based on performance and setting the pay bands as low as they can losing all their employees are orthogonal.
Suppose you are an employer and you have 5 junior engineers. You wish to promote one to senior engineer, which includes a move to a higher pay band. How do you decide which one gets the promotion?
Most companies are going to decide which one to promote at least partly based on performance data. Do they consistently finish things on time? What is the defect rate in their work? Do they work well with others? Do they need a lot of help compared to their peers or are the who their peers turn to when the peers need help? Does their work show skill above what would normally be found in junior engineer work?
From what has been quoted by or about the objects that one representative had it is that he thinks the bill has been written too broadly and could be construed as prohibiting using job performance data like that in deciding promotions.
margalabargala 7 hours ago [-]
Most companies want not the least an employee will take right now, but the least that will keep that employee around rather than jumping ship.
thunderfork 2 hours ago [-]
And when an industry at large is using RealPage for Wages, those two numbers may become increasingly similar
LocalH 5 hours ago [-]
current and historical capitalist trends, that's how
thayne 15 hours ago [-]
I like the idea, but I'm not sure how enforceable it will be in practice. It seems like it would be relatively difficult to prove a company is using surveillance pricing, and companies may just accept the risk of paying a fine.
TJSomething 13 hours ago [-]
If you can do traffic interception, there's a pretty good chance there's going to be traces of price levels in the API and the analytics. Especially since it's probably going to be bolted on to the side of anything PCI compliant. If there isn't, then it's probably going to be really easy to subpoena to prove mens rea, because getting that right is tricky and requires a fair amount of review and coordination.
bgirard 15 hours ago [-]
Subpoenas and whistleblowing are pretty good tools.
fzeroracer 14 hours ago [-]
It's actually not that hard to prove. For example, PSN now has dynamic pricing for their games which can vary quite wildly and all it takes is a small number of consumers with price differences to prove it. The same is true for grocery stores or whatever else.
Enforcing it is another question though and you're right that companies will likely just accept the fine. It's all the more reason why this sort of thing needs to aggressively be legislated against and denied.
throwaway85825 16 hours ago [-]
It would be better to just mandate disclosure of the algorithms and data for all prices determined by algorithm.
kelnos 12 hours ago [-]
No it wouldn't. How would that at all help the average consumer?
throwaway85825 6 hours ago [-]
It would expose the ridiculous amount of information advertisers have about you.
thunderfork 2 hours ago [-]
You can read privacy policies, terms of service and data sharing agreements today. Do you?
throwaway85825 2 hours ago [-]
They dont list the column names.
LadyCailin 13 hours ago [-]
I’d rather not have to minmax my grocery prices, thanks. Regulate this to death.
Sephr 18 hours ago [-]
Going to be interesting to see how this affects Uber prices in Colorado. afaict Uber heavily engages in surveillance pricing but claims otherwise, deferring to 'discount' terminology.
Is this the "electronic ink pricetags bad" thing that the UFCW keeps peddling because "it takes clerk work away"?
I still don't understand how they think we're going to change UPC pricing live per-person in the physical retail environment. Does the price tag change depending who looks at it? What if two people look at it at the same time? They obviously both can't be surveillance priced at that moment. The UFCW is mad they don't understand they can re-skill the worker that was trained to stick little paper labels up that they can now maintain pricetag batteries and hardware instead.
R_D_Olivaw 7 hours ago [-]
It's so damn dystopian that we're even toying with such things.
But have me an idea: for whatever reason, a person consistently gets lower prices, and offers to be your shopper. You end up paying less for groceries than you would if you went, but you have to pay your shopper. So pretty much same outcome, BUT, you didn't have to do the shopping
danny_codes 17 hours ago [-]
Very good news. Capitalism is going off the rails and needs to be heavily reigned in.
bwb 12 hours ago [-]
Agreed, I hope they can have some strong enforcement teeth with GIANT fines.
IG_Semmelweiss 20 hours ago [-]
seems incomplete. There's no point in banning anything, if anyone can just do something banned, flout the law, with no consequences.
and -at least in this article- the consequences seem noticeably missing
EDIT: Althought the article does not include it, the bill (linked from the article) does.
adestefan 19 hours ago [-]
It’s right at the top of the linked bill.
The attorney general or a district attorney may bring a civil action on behalf of the state against a person that violates the prohibition against individualized price or wage setting based on surveillance data to seek the imposition of civil penalties. In addition, a person aggrieved by a violation of the prohibition specified in the bill may bring a civil action on behalf of themself or a group of similarly situated persons to restrain further violations and to recover damages, costs, and reasonable attorney fees.
A violation of the prohibition against individualized price setting or individualized wage setting is a deceptive trade practice under the "Colorado Consumer Protection Act".
pnw 19 hours ago [-]
Allowing private right of action means this will be weaponized by attorneys in the same way the ADA has. Just scanning the bill, any small business in the US using dynamic pricing, targeted discounts or "VIP pricing" on their website would be open to suits from Colorado residents. The definitions are extremely broad and there is no safe harbor for small companies either. Damages are also uncapped and apparently Colorado allows treble damages for CCPA violations.
adgjlsfhk1 16 hours ago [-]
Sounds great! The theory behind capitalism only works if prices are transparent and goods are transferable. These sorts of "special discounts" are fundamentally harmful to the economy as a whole.
AnthonyMouse 15 hours ago [-]
> The theory behind capitalism only works if prices are transparent and goods are transferable.
The theory behind capitalism requires people to take into account what they know when making decisions.
Suppose you have a business where many customers expect to be able to try the product before committing to buy it so the cost of paying for shipping for "free returns" has to be incorporated into the advertised price. Then you notice that a subset of customers have a better idea of what they want and never trouble you with returns, so you want to give them a discount to try to get more of their business.
That's capitalism working the way it's supposed to. The customers who consume fewer resources get to pay lower prices. But it's the thing this bill prohibits, isn't it?
thayne 15 hours ago [-]
If capatilism was working the way it was supposed to, the customer could choose between paying more up front, but having the option of a "free" return, or paying less upfront byt having to pay for a return (or not be able to return it).
And for that matter, the customer would have enough information to know the quality of the product before purchasing, but that is often not possible.
AnthonyMouse 14 hours ago [-]
Everybody knows the cows are not actually spheres. It's about how you deal with it.
If you try to sell "return insurance" then some customers don't buy it but end up wanting to return it anyway and then leave you a bad review for not having free returns. That costs you more than charging somewhat higher prices and having free returns, so that's what you do instead. But now efficiency requires some other mechanism of allowing the people who don't do excessive returns to pay a lower price.
Also, suppose you actually did sell return insurance. Then you notice that a subset of the customers who buy return insurance rarely use it, so you want to give them a discount to try to get more of their business.
wat10000 8 hours ago [-]
Your idea of charging less to customers who know what they want is also a spherical cow.
They’ll buy your entire life from a data broker and charge you more because yesterday you accidentally viewed some Lamborghini seat covers. They’ll calculate that you have less willpower on Thursday nights and change their advertised price from $10 to ON SALE $2 off $12. They’ll just do coincidentally use the same algorithm to determine their price as all the other stores do so they don’t have to worry about competing on price.
AnthonyMouse 5 hours ago [-]
> They’ll buy your entire life from a data broker and charge you more because yesterday you accidentally viewed some Lamborghini seat covers.
You're describing incompetence. You're not actually rich just because you viewed something by accident which means you're not actually price-insensitive and they just lost the sale to someone else. That has nothing to do with algorithms, incompetent companies put themselves at a disadvantage and make fewer sales than other companies all else equal, and the ones that are sufficiently bad at it go bust.
> They’ll calculate that you have less willpower on Thursday nights and change their advertised price from $10 to ON SALE $2 off $12.
They do that regardless of whether it's Thursday.
> They’ll just do coincidentally use the same algorithm to determine their price as all the other stores do so they don’t have to worry about competing on price.
This again has nothing to do with algorithms. They can do the same thing by just looking at the prices other merchants are charging and setting the same ones, and if you really want to prevent this then the law you want is the one that prohibits manufacturers from enforcing "no sales below MSRP" against retailers.
Because in a market with a large number of retailers, the individual retailers all have the incentive to defect from a price fixing scheme, because increasing your market share from 0.5% to 20% by having the lowest price when those other idiots are refusing to compete on price is worth way more than having slightly better margins. This is why it's important that the number of competitors be large instead of small. Laws should be directed to ensuring that rather than trying to micromanage a consolidated market full of incumbents so large they can buy the government anyway.
wat10000 5 hours ago [-]
What if they’re not incompetent and you intentionally looked at Lamborghini seat covers, then, and correctly flagged you as willing to pay more as a result?
What if that fake sale tactic only works on you when your willpower is low and they know it?
Price fixing by software is a real thing. I agree that ensuring lots of competitors is a better way to avoid it. How would Colorado do that?
AnthonyMouse 5 hours ago [-]
> What if they’re not incompetent and you intentionally looked at Lamborghini seat covers, then, and correctly flagged you as willing to pay more as a result?
What they're more likely to do is show you higher end products, because a rich person (or the person they hire to buy things for them) still has the capacity to compare prices for the same product and then charging more for the same thing still loses them the sale in a competitive market. Whereas if they show you the premium product instead of the base product because they've correctly surmised that you'll prefer the better product even if it costs more, is that even bad?
> What if that fake sale tactic only works on you when your willpower is low and they know it?
Then they still use it all the time because that's more effective than trying to guess when your willpower is lower and sometimes being wrong.
> Price fixing by software is a real thing.
It's a hypothetical thing where it works as long as everybody is using the same software. Like the other methods of price fixing, it stops working as soon as anybody does something different because then customers just start buying from them, and then we're back to needing to make sure there are enough competitors that that's what happens.
> I agree that ensuring lots of competitors is a better way to avoid it. How would Colorado do that?
In a lot of markets it's already the case but they're applying laws like this to them anyway. In consolidated markets, we largely already have antitrust laws and the main problem is a lack of enforcement, so maybe go chop up some large corporations.
There are also some cases when the courts issue a bad antitrust interpretation and then you need the legislature to pass a short bill that basically points to that case and says "no, the opposite of that".
wat10000 2 hours ago [-]
Dynamic personalized pricing is a real thing. Has been for ages. The old-fashioned techniques are coupons and loyalty cards, or just having higher prices in higher-end stores. Competition isn't nearly as perfect as you say. It's very common for high-end stores to sell identical items at higher prices and still sell plenty of them.
These days you can do a much better job if you have data about your prospective customer. This is not a hypothetical. For example, Target was found to charge higher prices in their app if your location was close to one of their stores. Orbits and Delta have both been found to offer personalized prices as well.
Price fixing where everybody uses the same software is a real thing. RealPage recently settled a lawsuit over this.
You seem to be taking a very Libertarian approach where you assume economics 101 wins out over anything more complex, but if you look at what's actually going on in the world this is not the case.
irishcoffee 15 hours ago [-]
I can see how say, a roofing business might have a “VIP” sale during a slow season, such that a discounted contract is signed and money is exchanged in the future when the weather doesn’t prohibit the work.
I don’t think that is unreasonable.
Jiro 12 hours ago [-]
The season is the same for all customers, so that isn't surveillance pricing.
wat10000 8 hours ago [-]
I can see how a roofing business might buy your online shopping history, deduce that you drive a Lexus, and bump up their prices. Then profile you as not very handy, and cut corners knowing you won’t spot the issues.
thayne 15 hours ago [-]
On the other hand, without private right to action, consumers may have no recourse if the AG doesn't wish to pursue action (possibly due to corruption, or lack of resources).
JumpCrisscross 18 hours ago [-]
> any small business in the US using dynamic pricing, targeted discounts or "VIP pricing" on their website would be open to suits from Colorado residents
The solution is to use reasonable efforts to block Colorado residents if you can’t comply with the law. That’s a tradeoff a group of people are allowed to make for themselves.
AnthonyMouse 15 hours ago [-]
The problem is that a small business in Florida or Massachusetts that does 95% of their business in their own state may have no idea that this Colorado law exists until someone sues them over it.
We don't really want small companies to have to start blocking people in other states by default. That's not great for interstate competition.
dickersnoodle 5 hours ago [-]
You talk about that like it's a problem...
mememememememo 17 hours ago [-]
Is that a bad thing? If you ate going to discount (B2C), do it for all or do it for none.
wat10000 16 hours ago [-]
Ok, but surely there are also downsides.
wat10000 19 hours ago [-]
The article links to the law. Looks like this is an addition to the existing law about unfair or deceptive trade practices. That allows for a civil penalty of up to $20,000 per person or transaction involved.
pugchat 19 hours ago [-]
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jrochkind1 19 hours ago [-]
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OptionOfT 16 hours ago [-]
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eru 14 hours ago [-]
Sounds like the usual populism. I guess in practice people will route around the insanity.
He does not think this is is just selling it further? Oh no, it might prohibit software automatically determining my wages, how could we even have a society if we don't let computers figure out the least they can pay me without me quitting.
One of the frontrunners for the governorship is just spouting straight antisemitic garbage: https://www.9news.com/article/news/politics/gop-gubernatoria...
Edit: He withdrew this morning and is running for the GOP chair now.
Bobert is quiet these days but I'm sure she'll ramp up after her primary closes.
The various school boards are perennial sources of my idiocy. My (former) board would go into public meetings and just openly and freely admit to crimes.
The county commissioners in DougCo recently decided to fine the victims of shoplifting from r not reporting it. No, you didn't read that wrong.
So, in summary, the GOP and many, but not all, of their state level membership aren't really sending their best these days.
Suppose you are an employer and you have 5 junior engineers. You wish to promote one to senior engineer, which includes a move to a higher pay band. How do you decide which one gets the promotion?
Most companies are going to decide which one to promote at least partly based on performance data. Do they consistently finish things on time? What is the defect rate in their work? Do they work well with others? Do they need a lot of help compared to their peers or are the who their peers turn to when the peers need help? Does their work show skill above what would normally be found in junior engineer work?
From what has been quoted by or about the objects that one representative had it is that he thinks the bill has been written too broadly and could be construed as prohibiting using job performance data like that in deciding promotions.
Enforcing it is another question though and you're right that companies will likely just accept the fine. It's all the more reason why this sort of thing needs to aggressively be legislated against and denied.
I still don't understand how they think we're going to change UPC pricing live per-person in the physical retail environment. Does the price tag change depending who looks at it? What if two people look at it at the same time? They obviously both can't be surveillance priced at that moment. The UFCW is mad they don't understand they can re-skill the worker that was trained to stick little paper labels up that they can now maintain pricetag batteries and hardware instead.
But have me an idea: for whatever reason, a person consistently gets lower prices, and offers to be your shopper. You end up paying less for groceries than you would if you went, but you have to pay your shopper. So pretty much same outcome, BUT, you didn't have to do the shopping
and -at least in this article- the consequences seem noticeably missing
EDIT: Althought the article does not include it, the bill (linked from the article) does.
The attorney general or a district attorney may bring a civil action on behalf of the state against a person that violates the prohibition against individualized price or wage setting based on surveillance data to seek the imposition of civil penalties. In addition, a person aggrieved by a violation of the prohibition specified in the bill may bring a civil action on behalf of themself or a group of similarly situated persons to restrain further violations and to recover damages, costs, and reasonable attorney fees. A violation of the prohibition against individualized price setting or individualized wage setting is a deceptive trade practice under the "Colorado Consumer Protection Act".
The theory behind capitalism requires people to take into account what they know when making decisions.
Suppose you have a business where many customers expect to be able to try the product before committing to buy it so the cost of paying for shipping for "free returns" has to be incorporated into the advertised price. Then you notice that a subset of customers have a better idea of what they want and never trouble you with returns, so you want to give them a discount to try to get more of their business.
That's capitalism working the way it's supposed to. The customers who consume fewer resources get to pay lower prices. But it's the thing this bill prohibits, isn't it?
And for that matter, the customer would have enough information to know the quality of the product before purchasing, but that is often not possible.
If you try to sell "return insurance" then some customers don't buy it but end up wanting to return it anyway and then leave you a bad review for not having free returns. That costs you more than charging somewhat higher prices and having free returns, so that's what you do instead. But now efficiency requires some other mechanism of allowing the people who don't do excessive returns to pay a lower price.
Also, suppose you actually did sell return insurance. Then you notice that a subset of the customers who buy return insurance rarely use it, so you want to give them a discount to try to get more of their business.
They’ll buy your entire life from a data broker and charge you more because yesterday you accidentally viewed some Lamborghini seat covers. They’ll calculate that you have less willpower on Thursday nights and change their advertised price from $10 to ON SALE $2 off $12. They’ll just do coincidentally use the same algorithm to determine their price as all the other stores do so they don’t have to worry about competing on price.
You're describing incompetence. You're not actually rich just because you viewed something by accident which means you're not actually price-insensitive and they just lost the sale to someone else. That has nothing to do with algorithms, incompetent companies put themselves at a disadvantage and make fewer sales than other companies all else equal, and the ones that are sufficiently bad at it go bust.
> They’ll calculate that you have less willpower on Thursday nights and change their advertised price from $10 to ON SALE $2 off $12.
They do that regardless of whether it's Thursday.
> They’ll just do coincidentally use the same algorithm to determine their price as all the other stores do so they don’t have to worry about competing on price.
This again has nothing to do with algorithms. They can do the same thing by just looking at the prices other merchants are charging and setting the same ones, and if you really want to prevent this then the law you want is the one that prohibits manufacturers from enforcing "no sales below MSRP" against retailers.
Because in a market with a large number of retailers, the individual retailers all have the incentive to defect from a price fixing scheme, because increasing your market share from 0.5% to 20% by having the lowest price when those other idiots are refusing to compete on price is worth way more than having slightly better margins. This is why it's important that the number of competitors be large instead of small. Laws should be directed to ensuring that rather than trying to micromanage a consolidated market full of incumbents so large they can buy the government anyway.
What if that fake sale tactic only works on you when your willpower is low and they know it?
Price fixing by software is a real thing. I agree that ensuring lots of competitors is a better way to avoid it. How would Colorado do that?
What they're more likely to do is show you higher end products, because a rich person (or the person they hire to buy things for them) still has the capacity to compare prices for the same product and then charging more for the same thing still loses them the sale in a competitive market. Whereas if they show you the premium product instead of the base product because they've correctly surmised that you'll prefer the better product even if it costs more, is that even bad?
> What if that fake sale tactic only works on you when your willpower is low and they know it?
Then they still use it all the time because that's more effective than trying to guess when your willpower is lower and sometimes being wrong.
> Price fixing by software is a real thing.
It's a hypothetical thing where it works as long as everybody is using the same software. Like the other methods of price fixing, it stops working as soon as anybody does something different because then customers just start buying from them, and then we're back to needing to make sure there are enough competitors that that's what happens.
> I agree that ensuring lots of competitors is a better way to avoid it. How would Colorado do that?
In a lot of markets it's already the case but they're applying laws like this to them anyway. In consolidated markets, we largely already have antitrust laws and the main problem is a lack of enforcement, so maybe go chop up some large corporations.
There are also some cases when the courts issue a bad antitrust interpretation and then you need the legislature to pass a short bill that basically points to that case and says "no, the opposite of that".
These days you can do a much better job if you have data about your prospective customer. This is not a hypothetical. For example, Target was found to charge higher prices in their app if your location was close to one of their stores. Orbits and Delta have both been found to offer personalized prices as well.
https://retailwire.com/discussion/will-targets-dynamic-prici...
https://www.fastsimon.com/ecommerce-wiki/personalization/dyn...
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/personalized-pricing-ha...
Price fixing where everybody uses the same software is a real thing. RealPage recently settled a lawsuit over this.
You seem to be taking a very Libertarian approach where you assume economics 101 wins out over anything more complex, but if you look at what's actually going on in the world this is not the case.
I don’t think that is unreasonable.
The solution is to use reasonable efforts to block Colorado residents if you can’t comply with the law. That’s a tradeoff a group of people are allowed to make for themselves.
We don't really want small companies to have to start blocking people in other states by default. That's not great for interstate competition.