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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   3504 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for January 9, 2026

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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I've heard this called "perfect price discrimination" and airlines try to apply different prices not just to different seats, but to different passengers. They can easily map you to your digital profile via fingerprinting your browser (that includes facts like "loves to switch on incognito mode when shopping for airline tickets") and estimate how much more they can charge you for a seat just because you can afford it and your fellow passenger across the aisle can't.

This has always been rumoured and it's possible but is there any actual evidence of it?

It's not true to my knowledge, though I also believed it for some time. If nothing else, if it was true, you'd have airmiles obsessives writing thousands of blogs about optimizing it. Try to navigate the website of an average airline and you'll have a pretty good idea of how good their tech is. The talented guys they do have are generally in the "keep operations from falling apart in the next 24 hours" department rather than the price gouging department.

I looked up a couples of research articles yesterday that had experimented with different profiles and VPNs (firefox/safari, PC/iPhone, different countries, profiles corresponding to 'rich' customers i.e. luxury hotel websites vs. 'poor' customers) and found that differences were $10 max and didn't vary substantially across different countries let alone different user profiles, so I think you're right. But open to hearing otherwise.

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