Allowing private right of action means this will be weaponized by attorneys in the same way the ADA has. Just scanning the bill, any small business in the US using dynamic pricing, targeted discounts or "VIP pricing" on their website would be open to suits from Colorado residents. The definitions are extremely broad and there is no safe harbor for small companies either. Damages are also uncapped and apparently Colorado allows treble damages for CCPA violations.
Sounds great! The theory behind capitalism only works if prices are transparent and goods are transferable. These sorts of "special discounts" are fundamentally harmful to the economy as a whole.
> The theory behind capitalism only works if prices are transparent and goods are transferable.
The theory behind capitalism requires people to take into account what they know when making decisions.
Suppose you have a business where many customers expect to be able to try the product before committing to buy it so the cost of paying for shipping for "free returns" has to be incorporated into the advertised price. Then you notice that a subset of customers have a better idea of what they want and never trouble you with returns, so you want to give them a discount to try to get more of their business.
That's capitalism working the way it's supposed to. The customers who consume fewer resources get to pay lower prices. But it's the thing this bill prohibits, isn't it?
If capatilism was working the way it was supposed to, the customer could choose between paying more up front, but having the option of a "free" return, or paying less upfront byt having to pay for a return (or not be able to return it).
And for that matter, the customer would have enough information to know the quality of the product before purchasing, but that is often not possible.
Everybody knows the cows are not actually spheres. It's about how you deal with it.
If you try to sell "return insurance" then some customers don't buy it but end up wanting to return it anyway and then leave you a bad review for not having free returns. That costs you more than charging somewhat higher prices and having free returns, so that's what you do instead. But now efficiency requires some other mechanism of allowing the people who don't do excessive returns to pay a lower price.
Also, suppose you actually did sell return insurance. Then you notice that a subset of the customers who buy return insurance rarely use it, so you want to give them a discount to try to get more of their business.
Your idea of charging less to customers who know what they want is also a spherical cow.
They’ll buy your entire life from a data broker and charge you more because yesterday you accidentally viewed some Lamborghini seat covers. They’ll calculate that you have less willpower on Thursday nights and change their advertised price from $10 to ON SALE $2 off $12. They’ll just do coincidentally use the same algorithm to determine their price as all the other stores do so they don’t have to worry about competing on price.
> They’ll buy your entire life from a data broker and charge you more because yesterday you accidentally viewed some Lamborghini seat covers.
You're describing incompetence. You're not actually rich just because you viewed something by accident which means you're not actually price-insensitive and they just lost the sale to someone else. That has nothing to do with algorithms, incompetent companies put themselves at a disadvantage and make fewer sales than other companies all else equal, and the ones that are sufficiently bad at it go bust.
> They’ll calculate that you have less willpower on Thursday nights and change their advertised price from $10 to ON SALE $2 off $12.
They do that regardless of whether it's Thursday.
> They’ll just do coincidentally use the same algorithm to determine their price as all the other stores do so they don’t have to worry about competing on price.
This again has nothing to do with algorithms. They can do the same thing by just looking at the prices other merchants are charging and setting the same ones, and if you really want to prevent this then the law you want is the one that prohibits manufacturers from enforcing "no sales below MSRP" against retailers.
Because in a market with a large number of retailers, the individual retailers all have the incentive to defect from a price fixing scheme, because increasing your market share from 0.5% to 20% by having the lowest price when those other idiots are refusing to compete on price is worth way more than having slightly better margins. This is why it's important that the number of competitors be large instead of small. Laws should be directed to ensuring that rather than trying to micromanage a consolidated market full of incumbents so large they can buy the government anyway.
What if they’re not incompetent and you intentionally looked at Lamborghini seat covers, then, and correctly flagged you as willing to pay more as a result?
What if that fake sale tactic only works on you when your willpower is low and they know it?
Price fixing by software is a real thing. I agree that ensuring lots of competitors is a better way to avoid it. How would Colorado do that?
> What if they’re not incompetent and you intentionally looked at Lamborghini seat covers, then, and correctly flagged you as willing to pay more as a result?
What they're more likely to do is show you higher end products, because a rich person (or the person they hire to buy things for them) still has the capacity to compare prices for the same product and then charging more for the same thing still loses them the sale in a competitive market. Whereas if they show you the premium product instead of the base product because they've correctly surmised that you'll prefer the better product even if it costs more, is that even bad?
> What if that fake sale tactic only works on you when your willpower is low and they know it?
Then they still use it all the time because that's more effective than trying to guess when your willpower is lower and sometimes being wrong.
> Price fixing by software is a real thing.
It's a hypothetical thing where it works as long as everybody is using the same software. Like the other methods of price fixing, it stops working as soon as anybody does something different because then customers just start buying from them, and then we're back to needing to make sure there are enough competitors that that's what happens.
> I agree that ensuring lots of competitors is a better way to avoid it. How would Colorado do that?
In a lot of markets it's already the case but they're applying laws like this to them anyway. In consolidated markets, we largely already have antitrust laws and the main problem is a lack of enforcement, so maybe go chop up some large corporations.
There are also some cases when the courts issue a bad antitrust interpretation and then you need the legislature to pass a short bill that basically points to that case and says "no, the opposite of that".
Dynamic personalized pricing is a real thing. Has been for ages. The old-fashioned techniques are coupons and loyalty cards, or just having higher prices in higher-end stores. Competition isn't nearly as perfect as you say. It's very common for high-end stores to sell identical items at higher prices and still sell plenty of them.
These days you can do a much better job if you have data about your prospective customer. This is not a hypothetical. For example, Target was found to charge higher prices in their app if your location was close to one of their stores. Orbits and Delta have both been found to offer personalized prices as well.
Price fixing where everybody uses the same software is a real thing. RealPage recently settled a lawsuit over this.
You seem to be taking a very Libertarian approach where you assume economics 101 wins out over anything more complex, but if you look at what's actually going on in the world this is not the case.
> Dynamic personalized pricing is a real thing. Has been for ages.
The thing where you get a discount for making a below-average number of returns is also dynamic personalized pricing.
> Competition isn't nearly as perfect as you say. It's very common for high-end stores to sell identical items at higher prices and still sell plenty of them.
High-end stores are often selling more than just the product. Some people put a premium on buying from a place they trust not to carry low-quality products so they can save time needing to exclude those themselves, or to not provide them with a counterfeit or not make returns a hassle if there's something wrong with it when they get home. I mean how would you explain anyone buying from them otherwise?
> For example, Target was found to charge higher prices in their app if your location was close to one of their stores.
It's pretty obvious why they do this. It's more expensive to keep stock at a retail store with premium downtown real estate than a rural warehouse, but if you do then you'll get sales from customers who want to see the product before they buy it or who want to get it today instead of waiting for it to be shipped. So stores have to charge higher prices than websites to cover their higher costs.
Which creates a problem for a company that has both a store and a website. If they charge higher prices on their website than other websites, customers shopping at home will use another website. If they charge lower prices on their website, customers will come use the store as a showroom or take advantage of same-day store pickup but buy the product on their phone while in the store to get the website price, using the store without paying the higher costs of having a store. This is already putting many retail stores out of business because people will use the store as a showroom and then buy the same product on their phone from whatever website has the lowest price, but at least then the store has the advantage that you can walk out of there with the product instead of waiting for shipping.
Now, is raising the website price while you're in the store a good way to fix this? Maybe not, because it kind of pisses off the customers once someone figures it out and you get bad press. But that's the argument that they don't benefit from doing it, which is no reason to ban it. You don't have to punish companies for things the market will punish them for itself. Whereas if it's actually effective to help them keep the store open so that people continue to have a showroom and same-day pickup, why are we trying to stop this again?
> Price fixing where everybody uses the same software is a real thing. RealPage recently settled a lawsuit over this.
The fun thing about attempting to fix prices is that it's illegal regardless of whether it's effective. It's completely possible to net lose money by withholding units from the market to the net benefit of the landlords not using the same software, while simultaneously causing legal problems for yourself.
It turns out that "a fool and his money are soon parted" also applies to companies.
> You seem to be taking a very Libertarian approach where you assume economics 101 wins out over anything more complex, but if you look at what's actually going on in the world this is not the case.
The reason those things are taught in Econ 101 is that in the common case that's what happens. Competitive markets actually benefit customers.
The primary things you need from the government are a) to prohibit anti-competitive acts so that competition actually exists, b) to punish fraud and c) to price externalities imposed on people who aren't party to the transaction (e.g. environmental pollution).
You generally don't need (or want) the government to prohibit companies in a competitive market from doing things customers could avoid by just patronizing someone else. If many customers with 100+ options are knowingly choosing one you think they shouldn't, it's more often because they're getting something out of it than because the government is smarter and less corrupt than everyone else.
I can see how say, a roofing business might have a “VIP” sale during a slow season, such that a discounted contract is signed and money is exchanged in the future when the weather doesn’t prohibit the work.
I can see how a roofing business might buy your online shopping history, deduce that you drive a Lexus, and bump up their prices. Then profile you as not very handy, and cut corners knowing you won’t spot the issues.
On the other hand, without private right to action, consumers may have no recourse if the AG doesn't wish to pursue action (possibly due to corruption, or lack of resources).
> any small business in the US using dynamic pricing, targeted discounts or "VIP pricing" on their website would be open to suits from Colorado residents
The solution is to use reasonable efforts to block Colorado residents if you can’t comply with the law. That’s a tradeoff a group of people are allowed to make for themselves.
The problem is that a small business in Florida or Massachusetts that does 95% of their business in their own state may have no idea that this Colorado law exists until someone sues them over it.
We don't really want small companies to have to start blocking people in other states by default. That's not great for interstate competition.
If they got into the account they got everything. The publicly released pictures are more of a taunt meant to publicly signal that he’s fucked. I would bet (figuratively) that anyrhing of actual value is either being sold or leveraged. After all this is a man that has shown an almost infinite capacity for humiliation.
I love Proton but it's really low on usability since their calendar doesn't integrate with anything (by design). If you are used to managing a busy calendar it's quite a shock. And their docs and sheets apps are extremely minimal and basic.
Nobody has explained to me how iOS ad SDKs across different apps can track individual users given that there hasn't been an accessible GUID on iOS for many years now.
Enough location data becomes effectively unique: There is likely only one phone in the world that averages over X nighttime hours in my apartment-complex and averages over Y workday-hours in the the same office block where I work.
That kind of pattern can be used to determine that two or more different app-identities are the same person, and anybody buying that data has a strong incentive to try it.
Fingerprinting devices once you’re installed on them isn’t much harder than doing so in a web browser.
Have Instagram installed on your phone? Great, now every Meta-owned app _or advertiser running on their platform_ has a pretty good shot at identifying you based on IP, location, app usage, etc.
There is a ton of signal about identity available just by virtue of running alongside other apps. Screen size, OS version, and IP are pretty good proxies for unique identity, especially if all you care about is _probable_ matches.
My understanding was that it's very difficult to reliably fingerprint iOS devices. Apple limits access to identifiers and specifically disallows fingerprinting. For this application of tracking people, you'd need decent reliability or you'd just get noise.
And no, I don't have any Meta published apps on my phone for exactly the reason you outline. I'm very aware of how IDFV and IDFA work.
IDK how many people on HN have read When Prophecy Fails, but it's a seminal paper as I understand it. If you want a more contemporary and readable book on the same topic, When Prophecy Never Fails: Myth and Reality in a Flying-Saucer Cult by Diana Tumminia is very readable and covers the same ground.
Super interesting to see the original research challenged.
Electrek is a highly biased source, the editor has a grudge against Elon and Tesla. It's really unfortunate since it used to be one of the best EV sites.
One of them is a bus hitting a stationary Tesla - hard to paint that as the teslas fault.
A few are low speed reversing into things, the extreme majority of which done by humans are never reported and are not in the dataset comparing how many crashes Tesla have had vs humans.
I would say they’re facts, but they’re being used dishonesty
> One of them is a bus hitting a stationary Tesla - hard to paint that as the teslas fault.
Since the narratives are redacted, who's to say the Tesla didn't change lanes to be in front of the bus, slam on the brakes, then get rear ended?
Or pull partially out of a driveway, stopping and blocking a lane with a bus traveling 35mph in said lane and got hit by it?
> A few are low speed reversing into things, the extreme majority of which done by humans are never reported and are not in the dataset comparing how many crashes Tesla have had vs humans.
I'm sure this happens to humans all the time, but not a single one of those humans would be considered a good (or even decent) driver.
That is a completely made up bar that is impossible to test for, and can never be met.
Even Waymo have tons of reported crashes in the same document.
Self driving cars need to be better than the average human - which means less injuries and deaths. Given 100 people will be killed on the road in the US today, it’s actually not a crazy high bar to clear.
Is there evidence of that? No matter who is criticizing Musk's companies, they will get slandered in one way or nother, which doesn't mean Electrek isn't biased.
Tesla is not the market leader in BEVs. It's BYD (2.25m 2025), then Tesla (1.6m), then VW AG (1 million). Given the current growth/shrinkage rates (33% growth for VW AG, 9% drop for Tesla), they'll be third in a year or so.
Apple has removed all mention of theft tracking from their site once they added the stalking protection. Airtag is for people who lose things, not finding stolen things. You have less than an hour before an Airtag alerts a thief they are being tracked.
Unfortunately the anti-stalking features have made Airtag mostly useless for theft prevention. You have less than an hour to retrieve your item before the tag alerts the thief they are being tracked. I've seen it trigger as quickly as 30 minutes.
To me, the bigger problem is the lack of ability for Android phones to register an AirTag as recognized. They've never done anything to address the problem of "drive your wife's car and her AirTag is beeping at you and your Android phone is beeping at you and there's no way to tell either one to stop".
As the owner of many airtags and some Airpods who has switched to Android, this is infuriating. I get beeps and unknown tracker notifications multiple times a day.
There are technical limitations in Apples design that prevents Android or anyone else from fixing it.
I left iOS because of degrading UX, and the UX of these products has got even worse as a result.
Vendor/ecosystem lockin, all on purpose, to give as much friction and annoyment as possible without flatly refusing the service which is generally bad for PR and apple does care about keeping their image up. This is their typical behavior for a long time, their primary mission is to force you into their ecosystem, not selling specific hardware (with 30% margin but still at the end they don't care about that).
Try running airpods pro against any android phone. Severely degraded experience on purpose to the point of rendering them worse than chinese 10$ aliexpress buds and practically useless. Wife had them, worked fine with iphone mini 13 but she hated iOS with passion so eventually reverted back to samsungs. She had to give airpods pro to her sister who still has apple phone and bought some cheapish buds for 50 bucks which work flawlessly and she is happy again.
Maybe engineers at apple are consistently incompetent to implement basic bluetooth unlike any chinese sweatshop, but somehow I refuse to believe so.
I agree with the lock-in, but FWIW I love using my AirPods with my Android phone. They basically work great. I can't change settings on them, but I haven't done that since I set them up. They sound nothing like $10 aliexpress ear buds, they remember and auto-pair to my phone, two laptops, and an iPad. Totally usable.
I developed a device that turns an Airtag on and off at specific intervals (roughly 80% off 20% on). While the AirTag is off, it can’t be detected, and when it turns on again, you can locate it and with it your stolen item: https://undetectag.com
I'm about to order the new version to check whether it works on it too
I'm not fully onboard with the logic that we just have to live with a certain type of criminal behavior because the technology that could prevent it can be misused to enable another type of criminal behavior. We should aim to stop any kind of criminal behavior.
> I'm not fully onboard with the logic that we just have to live with a certain type of criminal behavior because the technology that could prevent it can be misused to enable another type of criminal behavior. We should aim to stop any kind of criminal behavior.
I don’t think anyone is making a claim that we should live with this according to first principles. I think people are saying this trade-off currently exists because it doesn’t seem to be economically or technologically feasible to solve both well.
How do you propose making an improvement to tracking technology that reduces theft while at the same time not assisting stalking?
One idea: if you report your AirTag as stolen, then it can continue to track the item, but you lose the ability to see where it is. In so doing you hand off tracking capability to some authority. This could be an improvement to the extent that the authority is trustworthy and well behaved. Unfortunately, such properties are not guaranteed across the globe. This would create more incentives for bribery for example.
We should, but also we should prioritise more harmful behaviour being prevented over less harmful behaviour, and stalking/harassment is in my opinion more harmful than property theft.
Frequency isn't really an issue here. I don't care that much if someone steals my luggage. I'd be a little mad if someone took my bike, but I have redundant protection for it, along with other things of more importance, or I keep them on me.
But I'd really, really not like to find out someone was following me around.
If society didn't have to spend the amount of resources that it does dealing with the consequences of personal theft then it would have more resources to direct towards issues like stalking.
I bet Apple could produce some really interesting data from these tools and others that could be used to proactively target stalkers and investigate them before their actions escalate to violence.
You're well beyond the scope of an Airtag at that point. Either you've insured the gear, or you ship it in some more secure fashion, or you have a satellite tracker in it, or whatever other mitigation you can do here. Airtags are great things you might misplace more than anything.
I'm not taking any position on this, but some data to chew on concerning the US. There are roughly fourteen million cases of larceny in the US every year, and between three and four million cases of stalking in the US every year. Rate of violence with larceny is roughly 1% whereas rate of violence with stalking averages 30%. Threats of violence with stalking occurs in about three out of every four cases, if I recall.
Of course, there is an implicit bias with measuring stalking as "peaceful" stalkers who never get caught leave no evidence. Unlike theft which always leaves evidence by its nature (the thing is gone).
It's wild to see someone this forthcoming with their selfishness. You literally said "It’s not fair to me", as if a just world would prioritize your inconvenience over the safety of others.
So you can either keep a tag on your stuff that lets anyone know where you are at all times, or just not misplace your keys. It really doesn't seem that hard to not use something this privacy intrusive if that's your threat model.
That's not the complaint at all - the complaint is that, because of the anti-stalking measures added at the original launch, the AirTags can't be used to track stolen items because the thieves will be notified that they are being "stalked".
How useful is a GPS position for theft prevention? IME cops are not interested in doing more than filing a report after a theft, even if you have a live GPS location of the item for them. Do you try and go get it yourself?
i can speak to this as i had my motorcycle stolen on NYE last year in Santa Monica with an airtag in it. the Santa Monica police said “smart, but it’s in LA so we can’t help you get it. tell the LAPD.”. it took me seven hours of calls to the LAPD while personally hunting down my bike in the shadiest areas of LA, and being a block away from getting it myself, did they come. so yes, if you’re in LA, you basically get it yourself.
in my case, the damage was so much i wish i had just left it stolen and taken the bigger insurance payout.
GPS won't prevent theft, but can help in recovery. Can.
But Apple does more stuff as well, like encrypting your phone and making it so even harvesting a stolen phone for parts is unattractive (everything has serial numbers and you can't just swap a part out).
Good point! But the only thieves I need to worry about are my past selves, who are always stealing time from my future self by not properly cementing the memory of where things get put down...
Setting expectations and thinning the herd. If even half of items had a well hidden air tag, and the cops successfully followed up even half of tagged thefts:
There would a. be less dumb criminals around to repeat offend and b. The smarter would-be criminals will do the calculus and and not steal items which could have tags.
In addition to this, AirTag also makes a sound when on the move.
This is also quite ridiculous, as it literally gives away that there is an AirTag there. I have seen people removing the speaker to eliminate this flaw.
I have only seen the Google side, just a single time when one of my Chipolos threw an alert on my passenger's Samsung.
My Chipolo certainly still works.
There are [cheap] tags being sold that are compatible with both Apple Find My and Google's Find Hub. I would rather have a dual-network device than Apple's improved model.
Would it be so difficult for Apple to put a hole in the Airtag so it could be directly attached to a keychain?
Do these tags need to be configured on both networks to support both protocols? If I own an Android device and configure it there, will Apple devices still find the tag? How does that work?
The Chipolos that I have purchased appear on my phone when first presented, then do not offer to pair to other users' Find Hubs unless I deregister.
I imagine that Airtag functionality is disabled when Find Hub configures these tags.
I have heard in the commentary here that Chipolo is now making dual-network devices, but only one can be active at a time.
Apple has a larger and more sensitive network, so uses requiring tracking quality would lean that way.
I would prefer to find a tag that can be provisioned on both networks. I don't know if any actually work that way.
I'd also like a tag that would let me take it apart and disable the speaker. For my car, that seems appropriate, if I can also find a placement location which is extremely difficult to access.
Edit: Google is saying that "they generally require switching between networks rather than operating on both simultaneously."
> Would it be so difficult for Apple to put a hole in the Airtag so it could be directly attached to a keychain?
Yes. It is surprisingly a near impossible engineering challenge at the levels Apple hardware is being done. Have you even considered the wear and tear that a mere hole in an ABS plastic molded detail would be subjected to over the lifespan of...several years?
(Just kidding, obviously they just want to upsell their customers with extremely overpriced accessories.)
It sends alerts to the thief's iPhone or Android (if you have Apple's Tracker Detect Android app) that they are being tracked within 30 to 60 minutes. It also enables the beeping so the thief can find and remove the Airtag.
If the Airtag can't reach the thief's phone, it starts chirping by itself within an 8-24 hour window.
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