What if the prices you pay increased based on where you live, what computer you use, or how your mouse moves across the page? Companies increasingly use personal data to set individualized prices, a practice critics call "surveillance pricing." Researchers have found examples ranging from higher hotel rates for Mac users to steeper ride-share fares for trips ending in non-white neighborhoods.
Is this smart business, or a new way of making us pay for our privacy?
We're chatting with Chao Jun Liu and Lena Cohen of EFF along with Grace Gedye, Consumer Reports' Policy Analyst, and Megan Abell, TechEquity's Vice President of Advocacy, to break down how it works, why privacy advocates like EFF say it harms privacy, equity, and competition, and what we can do to ban it. Join the livestream online followed by live Q&A.
EFFecting Change Livestream Series:
Same Product, Different Price
Thursday, November 5th
11:00 am - 12:00 pm Pacific - Check Local Time
Livestream followed by Q&A
THIS EVENT IS LIVE AND FREE
Accessibility
This event will be live-captioned and recorded. EFF is committed to improving accessibility for our events. If you have any accessibility questions regarding the event, please contact events@eff.org.
Event Expectations
EFF is dedicated to a harassment-free experience for everyone, and all participants are encouraged to view our full Event Expectations.
Upcoming Events
Want to make sure you don’t miss our next livestream? Here’s a link to sign up for updates about this series: eff.org/ECUpdates. If you have a friend or colleague that might be interested, please join the fight for your digital rights by this link: eff.org/EFFectingChange. Thank you for helping EFF spread the word about privacy and free expression online.
Recording
We hope you and your friends can join us live! If you can't make it, we’ll post the recording afterward on YouTube and the Internet Archive!
About the Speakers
Chao Jun Liu
Chao Jun Liu is a senior legislative associate at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. He assists in EFF's advocacy for a free, open, and accessible internet in state legislatures and Congress. He has a B.A. from U.C. Berkeley.
Lena Cohen
Lena Cohen is a Staff Technologist at EFF primarily focused on developing Privacy Badger—a browser extension used by over three million people to stop companies from tracking them as they browse the web. She also conducts research and advocacy on consumer privacy, the data broker industry, online behavioral advertising, automated decision-making, and the intersection of government and corporate surveillance. Lena holds a degree in Computer Science and Science, Technology, and Society from Brown University.
Grace Gedye
As a policy analyst at Consumer Reports, Grace Gedye focuses on artificial intelligence and issues including algorithmic bias, accuracy, independent testing, safety, impersonation, and more.
Prior to CR, Grace was a reporter with CalMatters, a nonprofit news organization in California. She covered economic and tech policy in the state, writing about everything from tax proposals to social media regulation. Previously, she was an editor and writer at the Washington Monthly in D.C., a policy magazine where she wrote and edited pieces on a range of subjects, including technology and antitrust.
Megan Abell
Megan Abell is the Vice President of Advocacy for TechEquity. Her work is centered on building political power to address inequities in the tech sector. Megan has been with TechEquity from the organization’s early days, working to build coalitions, win campaigns, and advance policy that ensures the tech industry works for everyone.
Megan’s expertise in facilitation, consensus-building, collaboration, and relationship-building have helped TechEquity establish powerful coalitions that drive our work. Those coalitions have influenced policymaking in the California legislature and at the ballot box. Her work in leading campaigns has helped enshrine TechEquity’s labor, housing, artificial intelligence research, and policy recommendations into law. During her time at TechEquity, she shepherded bold policies through the legislative process and to the Governor’s desk, lobbying on issues like pay transparency, expanded layoff protections, tenant’s rights, and more.
Before she joined the TechEquity team in February 2018, Megan worked at Common Sense Kids Action, where she developed and launched a mobilization program to engage parents in advocacy around tech issues that affect their children like privacy, cyber security, and screen-time addiction. That work builds on her experiences in her early career as an organizer and campaigner for unions, issue advocacy campaigns, non-profits, and candidates.
