Seattle Fair and Transparent Pricing Ordinance Written Comments

I'm Jon Pincus, a long-time King County resident, asking you to pass the Fair and Transparent Pricing Ordinance. My background is as a technologist and entrepreneur; I run the Nexus of Privacy newsletter, and have served on Washington State Automated Decision Systems Workgroup and the National Academy of Sciences/CSTB committee on Resilient Software.

Algorithmic price-based discrimination (also known as “surveillance pricing”), means they'll charge you more if they think they can get you to pay more. As my Mom said when I described it to her: “How can they get away with doing that? That shouldn’t be legal!” Indeed. And the Fair and Transparent Pricing Ordinance quite rightly prohibits algorithmic price-based discrimination for groceries, diapers, personal hygiene and grooming items, and over-the-counter drugs.

The need for prohibition is especially clear when it comes to these items. Food is not a luxury. Purchases of food are necessary for survival. 

But big tech firms and large retailers make a lot of money from surveillance pricing, so they're already using egregious lies to lobby against this ordinance. Don't believe them. This ordinance won't cause the sky to fall. Despite lobbyists' ludicrous claims to the contrary, the definitions in section 7.35.010 clearly allow loyalty and rewards programs, coupons, and discounts.

What the definitions don't allow is retailers using these mechanisms as sneaky back doors for black box algorithms that use our personal information to set individualized prices. And that's a good thing – for consumers. This ordinance will save the average family of four over a thousand dollars a year, money that would otherwise be going to big retailers and Big Tech.