The Washington Post Is Charging You What It Thinks You'll Pay

There’s a term doing the rounds right now: surveillance pricing. The short version is that a company uses data it has collected about you, your location, your browsing habits, your income bracket, your postcode, to decide what price to show you for a product. Not a universal price. Your price. The one an algorithm has decided you’re likely to pay.

The Washington Post is now facing a class action over exactly this. The allegation is that subscription prices were personalised based on collected user data. Different people, different prices, same product.

I’ll be honest: I wasn’t shocked. I was tired in a specific way, the way you get when something confirms what you already suspected but hoped wasn’t true.

One person in the online discussion around this mentioned getting a stream of re-subscription emails after cancelling, each with a different offer price. Sometimes $1 a week. Sometimes considerably more. That’s not personalisation in the friendly sense. That’s a negotiation where only one side knows it’s happening.

This is the thing about surveillance capitalism that still gets to me, even after years of reading about it. It’s not just that companies collect your data. It’s that they use it asymmetrically. You don’t get to know what they know about you. You don’t get to see the price they showed someone else. The transaction is designed to look neutral while being anything but.

The legal angle is interesting. A handful of US states now have laws touching on algorithmic pricing, but there’s nothing federal. Australia isn’t much better placed. The ACCC has done useful work on digital platforms, and the Privacy Act has been through some reform discussions, but the idea that a retailer or media company could be quietly charging you more because of your suburb hasn’t really entered mainstream policy conversation here yet. It probably should.

And there’s a particular irony in the Washington Post being the company in the dock for this. This is the paper that ran “Democracy Dies in Darkness” across its masthead. It’s the paper that built a significant chunk of its modern reputation on holding power to account. Jeff Bezos bought it in 2013 and for a while the arrangement seemed, if uncomfortable, at least workable. That goodwill has been spent down to nothing, and then some.

Journalism still matters. That’s the genuinely sincere thing I want to say here, without immediately undermining it. We need people who investigate, verify, and publish things that powerful institutions would prefer stayed quiet. That work is real and it’s hard and it’s underfunded. But the business models built around that work have, in too many cases, become indistinguishable from the surveillance infrastructure they were supposed to scrutinise.

I don’t know how you fix that. I don’t think anyone does yet. The class action might succeed or it might settle for something modest and quietly disappear. State-level laws on algorithmic pricing are a start, but they’re patchwork. The deeper problem is that the entire attention economy runs on this logic, and the Washington Post is not some outlier.

What I do know is that “we showed you a higher price because our algorithm decided you could afford it” is not a value proposition. It’s an admission. And if that’s what the Post was doing, the lawsuit is the least of its problems.