Surveillance pricing

*Surveillance pricing lets corporations decide what your dollar is worth.*

* Algorithmic wage discrimination doesn't need to use third-party surveillance data: Uber, who invented the tactic, use their own in-house data as a way to make inferences about drivers' desperation and thus their willingness to accept a lower wage.*

Uber stands accused of optimizing its pricing algorithm to manipulate both riders and drivers so that they make out worse and the company profits more.

Note that this is not an injustice of nonfree malware. The software for the pricing algorithm runs in Uber's own computer. It is, I suppose, Uber's private software, but if it were someone else's released free software that Uber used a copy of, Uber would have the right to make the same modifications in its copy.

The app that riders must use to be customers of Uber is nonfree software and does have a malicious surveillance functionality, but the computerized manipulation being criticized here is not particularly related to that.

What makes the manipulation possible is that Uber forces its customers to identify themselves, so it can make a complete record of its dealings with each customer. It has a similar asymmetry of information about each driver (and that could hardly be avoided). The results are unjust because they are dooH niboR at work, enriching the rich owners and pushing down the low-income drivers.

In my view, the lessons are (1) don't assume that all nasty behavior of computing is caused by nonfree software, (2) governments should stop Uber from identifying its customers or requiring them to run nonfree software, and (3 governments should regulate drivers' pay to keep it higher.

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