JetBlue sued over claims it uses customers’ personal data to set ticket prices

> The lawsuit followed an 18 April exchange on X where a passenger praised JetBlue but said “a $230 increase on a ticket after one day is crazy. I’m just trying to make it to a funeral”. > > JetBlue’s response said the passenger should try “clearing your cache and cookies or booking with an incognito window. We’re sorry for your loss.” The Long Island City, New York-based carrier said on Monday its response was incorrect, while adding that “fares can change at any moment as seats are purchased or as inventory is adjusted based on demand”. I'd be willing to bet they have an AI assistant of some sort that replies to tweets and suggested this, it'll be fun to see what discovery reveals regarding this practice.

I remember airlines using dynamic pricing schemes 15 years ago. If you checked the price of a flight, it set a cookie on your browser so if you came back and checked again the price would go up making you feel like you have to buy asap before it went up again. If you cleared cookies, bam the price is back to the original lowest price. Should be illegal.

Surveillance pricing should be illegal and heavily punished. The US desperately needs better consumer protections. Among a trillion other things...

If that’s true why don’t they know that I’m BROKE

> Surveillance pricing lets companies use browsing histories, locations and other personal data to set individual prices. > The lawsuit followed an 18 April exchange on X where a passenger praised JetBlue but said “a $230 increase on a ticket after one day is crazy. I’m just trying to make it to a funeral”. An airline basically going "this potential customer's browsing history indicates they may be trying to fly out to a funeral, we should increase our ticket price to take advantage of that!" is indicative of everything that's wrong with our society today.

I've always been told to clear history and cookies before shopping for flights because of this.

Hey guys, can you remind me what stage of capitalism this is again?

This would shake up the industry and set a precedent. Expecting every airline to jump in defense of Jet Blue because everyone does this and AI will only optimize this further in favor of the airlines. Landmark case if it continues, IMO. Should be fun to follow this and see how far it goes.

All corporations are tasked with taking as much from us as possible and providing the least in return. That's called capitalism.

I’m surprised that this is a surprise to anyone. Airlines have been practicing this way for many many years.

Next up, ai cameras in the shopping isles. So when you move your arm to grab something the price jumps right before you get a hold of it.

The foundational question is: Why is the price disconnected from the cost of delivering the service?

Airlines hsve been doing this for years, just with the geolocation of customers. Its not an issue with airlines alone; its a problem which can reach any online market. It should be required legally that online stores provide the same price and same visible products for sale to any user regardless of their data. Ban per user price adjustments/dynamic pricing.

Oh no. It’s so unfortunate I have -$1 in my bank account and the only thing that could interest me in purchasing a plane ticket is $20 first class seats…

In case anyone is interested, Biden started prioritizing surveillance pricing regulation before the term ended and the trump admin via FTC has has deprioritized any investigations or regulations on it

And another evil aspect of AI rears its head. They will take as much money as they can, be damned with humanity.

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Nothing beats a JetBlue lawsuit

FYI, this is also how your boss determines your wages.

Delta does the same thing. Really would be helpful to have the government provide consumer protection support…

They won’t be the last company to do this and we need to nip it immediately. If we allow this at all it will become the norm across the board.

I suspect other airlines do the same. It has been an issue with my last 3 bookings.

Actually this is true. Once you tap on a price and look at dates/times, then suddenly at check out the prices rise! Expedia does this as well!

when any business uses my ip address to pin point where I live and charge based on the market value of what it costs to live there that is beyond fuckked up just cause I live in x City I have to pay higher prices just cause lol this is straight up bs

Amazon does this too. Vpn and clear cookies before you shop Amazon

This happens with Lyft too. Try shopping around on a few different services at the same time. They’ll jack your prices up sometimes almost double. I know they do it on purpose because people just pay it

Maryland JUST made this illegal

this idea of dynamic pricing and charge customers what they think you can afford shit is insane. 

Happened to me several times. I think all airlines do this.

Airlines and hotels have practiced dynamic pricing LONG before personalized data was readily available, they will use all available tools toward that end. Experiment: you and a friend shop for the same flight and hotel for an imaginary trip to a place half way across the country. Be in the same room, but different networks, maybe one on wifi and the other one on cell data or a vpn. You WILL get different pricing.

I know this comment will probably get lost in all the noise - but there are so many misconceptions and out right myths in this thread. It only takes a little bit of googling and research to look at how fares are published, priced, and how they are bucketed, and how users end up seeing different prices depending on the time window that they’re booking in. There is no cookie tracking impact to prices and certainly no magic AI adjusting prices. Ticketing is extremely complex, look it up for yourself. https://liveandletsfly.com/jetblue-surveillance-pricing-technology/ Source: worked in tech for several airlines. Edit: that’s not to say airlines wouldn’t like to do this, if you want to see more detail look up the concept of NDC.

Is using such information to adjust prices illegal or just shady?

The AI saying the quiet part out load. The AI keeps fuckin' around and it will be replaced by a human.

This should be illegal. 

Isn't this the whole idea of our capitalist system. "Charge what the market will bear". So charge wealthy people more. Problem is that it will eventually mean less service for poorer people as the companies decide to only cater to the higher price point

I know this came because of that tweet but hasn’t that been common knowledge for years? I feel like it was just a thing that prices change day to day on things like insurance, apartment rentals, hotel costs, and in this case plane tickets. It’s the entire reason the internet cookie even exists and why a lot of people set up an auto deletes on cache and cookie. Or use an incognito on tab/private browser like Opera and Brave to prevent logged information.

In a way companies have been doing that for years. That's why some things are priced out per month or the monthly payment if purchased on credit.

*claims*? Is the Guardian too scared to say **admission**? Because the whole thing is based a public tweet they wrote. What's next, *allegedly*? 🐔

I bet they're all doing this. You get interesting results if different people try to us Cheapoair, Kayak, sites like that.

That's pretty much the equivalent of what I saw Sony was doing with their PlayStation games.

I don't think the right approach here is getting upset, so much as figuring out how to create an alternate online identity who's poor to get dynamically *lower* pricing. (I mean, these headlines are always about some customers paying more than others, but who are these "others" and how do I make sure I'm one of them?)

This is a version of Dynamic Pricing. Dynamic pricing is adjusting the cost of a product based on a number of factors including demand, supply, customer info, etc. And I think you'll find few people who argue against the ideas of supply and demand. If there's more supply, you can lower prices. If there's more demand, you may be able to raise prices. Like how the more popular actors on Cameo can charge more because people want their shoutouts vs someone most people won't know. Or if you're an author and are just trying to sell off your book inventory, you lower the prices to make space in your storage. Generally this can be in consumers' favor. And I think there's probably nothing too wrong in seeing that if a big business sells a lot of let's say orange juice in high volume, that they can raise/lower the price regularly because they know orange juice is a big seller and they may have to adjust their prices relative to their inventory because they're on such a large scale. But the downside is when it's done so rapidly and in some unfair way that doesn't actually reflect supply and demand, it's just a clever way to call it price fixing. Airlines are notorious for this. People have had issues where they look at a price, look a day later and the price has gone up, then people rush to buy the ticket because they're worried the price is going to change. It's some version of an online haggle to which you nave no clue any of it is happening and have little to no power to haggle back. There is a much larger danger of this. Pretty much everyone with a phone or computer has a MASSIVE amount of data on them. That gets sold off to data collectors. With that, you can in real time figure out a lot about this person. So imagine that example of having a moment of doubt for ANYTHING you buy at the grocery store. That could be determined nowadays by phone movement or location data or maybe someday, if we get dystopian, with in-store cameras with retinal detection. With fast real-time analysis, imagine walking by something, thinking about wanting it, walking back, then getting it and seeing the price increase. Same thing with the airline, now with your groceries. Imagine you're a list-maker. Well, if people know your shopping habits, why not increase your prices on everything. You're not changing your habits. It could create a situation where, for exaggeration's sake, your neighbor spends $3 on bread and you spend $12. Imagine the AI analysis of you holding an object in your hands creates that feeling of hesitation for the AI. Imagine it determines that doubt for when you leave stuff in your cart for five minutes to talk to a friend, because they want checkout times faster. And it engineers your shopping time based on who you are and how much others are likely to buy when you're there. That's something ripe for discrimination. There could be social engineering to a wild degree. Imagine this being used to discriminate more brazenly. Like if you grow up in a poorer area that may have a larger minority population courtesy of America being America. Imagine just raising prices on those staple items knowing there is no place else to go for cheaper goods nearby, further impoverishing people for buying essentials. Or, using data to engineer behavior. To sell goods that may be unhealthy because other reasonably priced locally-sourced foods don't pay as much for dynamic pricing services as big agro businesses. Imagine because you got a nice phone, because you got sick and had to order Instacart groceries, that now all of your prices go up and down in real time because the system thinks you're rich. With no accountability because people can just blame the AI they have no clue how to control or how it works. Imagine all of this changes our behavior. Changes what we eat. Who eats what based on who wants to get their goods sold. Our health, out lives, impacted when the richest push us to only be able to use their services, price out competition, then make themselves the only game in town. It's exceptionally dangerous. All of this is to figure out how to get you to pay more for what you need and are interested in buying with data you are just forced to consent to. It's not the market. It's someone knowing you and your psychology and f****** with you to give them more money, regardless of the consequence to you. This is for sure some version of price fixing and unfair consumer practices. Maryland right now is on track to ban this kind of pricing they call "surveillance pricing." I really hope people can ban it. It's really dangerous.

So why can't we get free tickets???

Not sure how I feel. Airlines are a for profit company. If the top 20% of people are all buying their tickets and the airlines are scraping by, then it just makes sense. But if a millionaire buys an airplane ticket at the same time as a poor person, the millionaire shouldn't be paying hundreds more either just because they bought it from a mac or if they were in gary indiana.

So...rich people have to pay more? Not sure how badly I feel about that. But if it's desperate poor people who have to pay more, f*** jetBlue.

Airlines as a whole do this. Get on a VPN and get yourself looking like you are in a different country and purchase the ticket from there while on the vpn it will be cheaper than if you are in the states and searching for exact same flights!! Also, They do more with the info such as booking seats and such, they will try and put men next to other men rather than a man next to a woman when there are seats to fill . Such as lets say there is one last first class seat available and there is a waiting list of multiple people. Lets just say the surrounding seats around that seat are women. Lets say there is a man at the top of the waiting list... they will give it to a woman. They do these TYPES of things because they try to watch how they place people so that they can not be blamed if something goes wrong. Like a man next to a woman type of thing. Its not always but you will see shifting of seats if they were not reserved specifically , for this type of reasoning .

Social media team is cooked.

Dynamic pricing really will be the thing that eventually pushes me over the edge. Purely evil.

I started using google flights to check pricing b4 going to the airline to book. I usually use the link google provides to book as well. If an airline is going to try to up charge me, their pricing won’t be lowest and I won’t be buying from them.

Capitalism is so efficient.

I flew that shit airline once. They have the rudest staff I've ever interacted with and I once had to change a United ticket in Philadelphia.

That’s the same answer all the airlines give in such a case. I did RYANAIR and it was indeed the same answer when clients complain about the prices.

Please sue the shit out of them

So how long until this case is settled out of court for an undisclosed sum?

And spirit gets 500 million of our money. So great corporations have all the power /s