The journalist Lindsay Owens is on Walmart’s bad side. After she uncovered several deeply creepy patents designed to surveil and de-anonymize their customers, the company has firmly denied they would ever, ever implement such terrible things. No one really believed them. Today on the show, Lindsay explains Walmart’s surveillance patents, and more stories from her book, Gouged, about the future of pricing, where algorithmically determined personalized gouging could run rampant without regulatory intervention. We also discuss the impact of Lindsay’s work, her congressional testimony, and the important role prices play in democracy.
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