The Same Price for Everybody

I have a PC Optimum card, and most of the time I scan it without giving it much thought. Groceries. Card. Points. Done. Every once in a while the app gives me an offer worth using, and I’m pleased with myself as though I somehow negotiated it. I did not negotiate anything. The computer offered it to me. There has been a lot of discussion lately about surveillance pricing, the idea that a company could use information it has about you to decide what price *you* should pay. Not what everyone should pay. You. If a box of cereal is $5.99 for me and $4.99 for the guy standing beside me because an algorithm thinks I’ll tolerate the extra dollar, most of us know exactly how we feel about that. Loblaw says it doesn’t happen in grocery. This summer, the company said surveillance pricing “does not exist in grocery” and that it will never use that kind of pricing. Fair enough. But this week I went looking through the PC Optimum privacy material, and that is where the question gets more complicated. Loblaw’s general privacy policy had just been updated, effective Sept. 30, while its separate loyalty notice spells out something much more familiar. PC Optimum is built to provide a “personalized experience.” It uses past purchases and other information to tailor rewards to the things you buy most. In other words, the price on the shelf may be the same for both of us. The deal in our pockets may not be. You might get points on coffee because you buy coffee. I might get an offer on something completely different. Somebody else may get nothing at all. That is not surveillance pricing in the way people usually mean it. Nobody has secretly added a dollar to my cereal. But if a personalized offer changes what I effectively pay, then the old idea that everybody walking through the same grocery store is having exactly the same transaction starts getting harder to defend. The shelf can still show one price while what you actually pay depends, at least partly, on who is holding the phone. Ottawa has noticed the issue too. Bill C-36, tabled in June, is the federal government’s latest attempt to rewrite private-sector privacy law, and its background material identifies “inappropriate surveillance pricing” as an unfair use of personal information the legislation is intended to address. At a media briefing, officials said the bill does not simply ban surveillance pricing. They pointed to possible benefits, including targeted discounts, and said the regulator would ultimately have to determine what counts as an appropriate use. Use what you know about me to make something more expensive and I’ll probably be furious. Use what you know about me to make it cheaper and I may thank you for the points. Same data. Very different reaction. The data itself has already caused trouble. In March, the federal Privacy Commissioner ruled on complaints from six PC Optimum members who had tried to delete their accounts. Loblaw removed names, email addresses and other direct identifiers, but retained information that included historical transaction data. During the investigation, Loblaw took the position that the remaining information had been effectively anonymized. The Privacy Commissioner found the company had not demonstrated that adequately, and Loblaw accepted the recommendations, including an independent review of its anonymization practices. That part matters more than the points. The receipt used to come out of the machine and go into my pocket. Now the store can keep a memory of the transaction too: what I bought, when I bought it, what offers I used and what I tend to buy again. That history can then help decide what offer appears on my phone next Tuesday. There is nothing automatically sinister about any of this. The old grocery flyer was trying to influence what I bought too. Coupons did the same thing. So did 10 per cent Tuesdays, seniors’ discounts, club cards and the paper coupon somebody clipped from the newspaper and carried around in a wallet for three weeks. Which brings me to the obituary. Maybe “the same price for everybody” isn’t dead. Maybe it never really existed. We have always found ways to charge one customer a little less than another. What has changed is who does the clipping. It used to be me, at the kitchen table, with a pair of scissors and the grocery flyer. Now the coupon clips itself. And it knows what I bought last week.