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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Horan doesn't know what to make of this, but he speculates that because Fetcherr bills itself as an AI company, Delta thinks it can impress investors by claiming that it will goose prices by combining surveillance (well understood to be a way to benefit corporations at the expense of their customers) and AI, a hype-filled technology that is endlessly impressive to credulous investors.

A bigger mystery is how Fetcherr plans to do surveillance pricing without surveillance.

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Horan points out that the company's founders come from hedge funds, where automated high-speed AI trader-bots fed on tons of public market data are routinely used. He thinks it's possible that "Fletchrr doesn’t understand airline pricing very well." Also, being finance bros, they thought "airlines were 'outdated' 'undisrupted' and had seen few recent technological advances."

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Horan continues, the reason airlines aren't updating their algorithmic pricing is they've already done it all, having pioneered the field.

Horan's favored explanation for the disconnect between what Fetcherr and Delta claim they're doing is, on the one hand, they're obscuring the fact that they're doing surveillance pricing (to avoid regulators and consumer backlash), but on the other hand, they want to telegraph (to investors) that this is *exactly* what they're doing.

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It's what Uber already does, repricing both the labor of its drivers based on their economic desperation, and the cost of your fare based on what its surveillance dossier suggests you're willing to pay. It's certainly increased Uber's margins - by effecting a pure transfer from riders and drivers to shareholders.

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But Uber rides are last-minute, small dollar purchases, which decreases the likelihood that a rider will shop around before booking. By contrast, Horan says, most fliers buy well in advance, from online travel sites that show them *lots* of competing prices.

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One thing Horan doesn't mention here is that British Airways has just done a top-to-bottom rejig of its frequent flier program to severely penalize anyone who buys tickets from one of these sites, effectively requiring its fliers to buy from BA.com. For example, I booked a $300 Alaska Airlines ticket on Alaska's website, using my BA frequent flier ID.

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Under the old system, this would have been worth 10 tier points out of the 1500 needed to get Gold status (0.66%). Under the new system, I got *12* points out of the *20,000* needed to get Gold (0.05%) - a 93% reduction in the reward value of this flight.

Which is to say that if you don't book on BA's site, you effectively *cannot* make status. BA has *also* announced a surveillance pricing deal with an AI company .

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This gambit will block its best fliers from getting a better price from an online travel agency.

One other key difference between Uber and Delta: Uber has gone to great lengths to hide the fact that it's doing surveillance pricing from both drivers and riders. Delta issued a press-release!

There's a certain kind of neoclassical economist who *loves* surveillance pricing and praises its "efficiencies."

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