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All You Can Pay
How Companies Use Our Data to Empty Our Wallets
Description
You don’t care who can access your data because you have nothing to hide. But what if corporations were using that data to control your decisions?
As millions of consumers carry on unaware, powerful corporations race to collect more and more data about our behaviors, needs, and desires. This massive trove of data represents one of the most valuable assets on the planet.
In All You Can Pay, Anna Bernasek and D. T. Mongan show how companies use what they know about you to determine how much you are willing to pay for everything you buy. From college tuition to plane tickets to groceries to medicine, companies already set varying prices based on intimate knowledge of individual wants and purchasing power. As the consumer age fades into history, rapidly changing prices and complex offers tailored to each individual are spreading like a fog over the free market. Data giants know everything about us before we enter stores or open our browsers. We may think that the Internet lets us find the best deals, but the extensive information companies have about us means that the price we see tends toward the maximum they know we can pay. In a momentous shift, the economics of information will turn our economy on its head. Fair bargaining is over.
As millions of consumers carry on unaware, powerful corporations race to collect more and more data about our behaviors, needs, and desires. This massive trove of data represents one of the most valuable assets on the planet.
In All You Can Pay, Anna Bernasek and D. T. Mongan show how companies use what they know about you to determine how much you are willing to pay for everything you buy. From college tuition to plane tickets to groceries to medicine, companies already set varying prices based on intimate knowledge of individual wants and purchasing power. As the consumer age fades into history, rapidly changing prices and complex offers tailored to each individual are spreading like a fog over the free market. Data giants know everything about us before we enter stores or open our browsers. We may think that the Internet lets us find the best deals, but the extensive information companies have about us means that the price we see tends toward the maximum they know we can pay. In a momentous shift, the economics of information will turn our economy on its head. Fair bargaining is over.
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Praise
"A well-written, vivid, and harrowing look at the microcosm of surveillance. A must read for all concerned citizens." —Robert Scheer, author of They Know Everything About You and The Great American Stickup
"There have been plenty of warnings about corporations profiting from data and compromising privacy, but this straightforward analysis never succumbs to alarmism while letting the facts speak for themselves. [The authors] build a case that will hit home with the personal finances of any reader who has ever done anything online. [They] understand how to write about specialized topics for a general readership, and they deliver their most frightening news in the most understated, straightforward manner... Hope lies in what the authors call 'Data Environmentalism,' raising the consciousness about this threat the way Silent Spring sparked the environmental movement. Well informed and useful." —Kirkus Reviews
“Anna Bernasek and D.T. Mongan have produced a model of lucidity—and urgency—on a topic that needs to be 'top-of-mind' for all of us. Everybody—in the true meaning of that word—ought to read this book. Now. ” —Tom Peters, international bestselling author of In Search of Excellence
"There have been plenty of warnings about corporations profiting from data and compromising privacy, but this straightforward analysis never succumbs to alarmism while letting the facts speak for themselves. [The authors] build a case that will hit home with the personal finances of any reader who has ever done anything online. [They] understand how to write about specialized topics for a general readership, and they deliver their most frightening news in the most understated, straightforward manner... Hope lies in what the authors call 'Data Environmentalism,' raising the consciousness about this threat the way Silent Spring sparked the environmental movement. Well informed and useful." —Kirkus Reviews
“Anna Bernasek and D.T. Mongan have produced a model of lucidity—and urgency—on a topic that needs to be 'top-of-mind' for all of us. Everybody—in the true meaning of that word—ought to read this book. Now. ” —Tom Peters, international bestselling author of In Search of Excellence