Definition
Plain language
Charging different people different prices based on personal data about them.
As stated in the literature
Personalized pricing driven by behavioral or financial data collected about the buyer, approximating willingness-to-pay extraction; the episode's finding is that a buyer-side agent can reproduce the same effect without a seller in the loop.
Also called: surveillance-pricing
Why it matters: It turns data about you into a higher bill, and if your own assistant can produce the same effect, the problem no longer stops at the seller's website.
For example, two people search for the same hotel room on the same day and see different prices because one has a browsing history suggesting they will pay more.
Heard on the show
“For the annotated version of this one — every term here tap-to-define, with links out to the surveillance-pricing and agent-security papers it’s in conversation with — that’s over at paperdive dot AI.”Episode 275 — Your AI Agent Read Your Inbox, Then Quoted a Higher Price