Chaser: AI is quietly being used to pick your pocket.
Retailers like Amazon know so, so much about what you buy, both on its platform and off. And you have no way of knowing when your choices are changing what you pay. In 2018, it was headline news that Amazon adjusted prices 2.5 million times a day. Given Amazon’s growth and the growth of AI, the number is likely an order of magnitude higher today. For retailers like Walmart, it’s not enough to use our shopping history. In February, the retail behemoth agreed to buy the smart-TV maker Vizio for more than $2 billion, potentially giving Walmart a windfall of intimate consumer data. Smart TVs not only monitor what we watch with Orwellian precision but track other nearby devices with ultrasonic beacons, and can even listen in to what we say in the privacy of our own homes. Vizio specifically has been fined millions of dollars over allegations that it illegally spied on customers.
Not only do retailers know what you’ve bought and how much money you make, but often they know where you are, how your day is going, and what your mood is like, all of which can be neatly synthesized by AI neural networks to calculate how much you’d pay for a given item in a given moment.
I suspect there’s money to be made combating this in anonymized AI shopping front ends to sniff out the best deals.