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The Civil Rights Act requires companies not to discriminate against legally protected classes. That includes both disparate treatment and disparate impact. I
by jawns 1y ago
The Civil Rights Act requires companies not to discriminate against legally protected classes. That includes both disparate treatment and disparate impact.
I can't see how "personalized pricing" would remain unchallenged, given those hurdles, if it truly means pricing fares based on individual characteristics.
It's totally fine to have loyalty programs that reward people who fly Delta frequently with better rates.
But when an ML model is making inferences about a person's willingness to pay based on what data a company has collected about them, that really feels like it's moving into murky waters, even apart from the predatory element.
- mvieira38 1y agoMaybe their excuse will be that it can't be proven whether or not the deep learning model is discriminating based on this or that, it's just taking in as much data as possible?
- lawlessone 1y agoyeah seems likely if they know peoples browsing habits they could easily indirectly be basing prices on protected characteristics
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- darth_avocado 1y agoYou’d have to demonstrate that the pricing consistently is high/low based on one of the protected classes to successfully challenge it.
- morkalork 1y agoAssuming their model is accurate at predicting economic value and assuming that the wage gap between men and women still exists, wouldn't it be relatively straightforward to show men as a group are quoted higher prices?
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- eastbound 1y agoMen aren’t a protected class. I’m not sarcastic: They really are not, it’s legally ok to charge men more.
- AnthonyMouse 1y agoThe general problem here is that "disparate impact" is incoherent. If you charge everyone the same price then you're de facto excluding people with less money, and therefore have a disparate impact on the basis of various protected classes because of the correlation between e.g. race and poverty. Now suppose you charge less to people with less money. Is that what you're supposed to do? No, sorry, there was a preexisting disparity in your customer population on the basis of national origin and doing that makes it worse, you still lose. There are multiple protected classes and how something affects one of them is often the inverse of how it affects a different one, so it isn't possible to not have a disparate impact. And then whether something is considered to in any given case is nothing but politics and vibes.
- darth_avocado 1y agoIf you are getting a different treatment purely because you’re a man, then you can absolutely sue and win.
- red-iron-pine 1y ago"Men" and "being a man" sure as hell is a protected class, and there are plenty of lawsuits to back it up. e.g. https://www.foxnews.com/story/texas-man-settles-discrimination-lawsuit-against-hooters-for-not-hiring-male-waiters https://www.foxnews.com/story/texas-man-settles-discriminati... like it's literally a 5 second search on the google or bing to prove
- cjbgkagh 1y agoI thought the bar was that you had to prove that it doesn't discriminate which a is much higher, I thought this is what drove many settlements. Personally I would rather limit all price discriminations to a simple predictable and publicly inspectable customizable formulae. It's like the finance guys who exalt the virtues of increased liquidity but that disappears the moment you try to use it. Similar for the extra complexity for price discovery.
- fwip 1y agoAs a student of political science, I agree with you. However, the current political administration and Supreme Court seem unlikely to be interested in protecting consumers in this way.
- red-iron-pine 1y agothe current administration and SCOTUS are doing everything they can, aggressively, to screw over the average consumer
- Hilift 1y agoThere's complexity here that could sway a court. A few years ago, we engaged an AI company to identify potentially problematic hospitality customers. Those were required to check in in person at the front desk instead of the app. Sounds like it could fail those tests, but those tests are for humans and this is AI!
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- red-iron-pine 1y agothe second it leaks that "potentially problematic hospitality customers" disproportionally target a minority you and the AI company will be sued aggressively from all sides.
- Hilift 1y agoOh sure, and the publicity would actually be worse. But these were organized crime gangs that would check in, steal everything, and leave in 15 minutes. So the investigation and targeting was fairly narrow. It wasn't designed to filter unruly guests or anything else.
- chollida1 1y agoInteresting thought. What specific protected class is "harmed" by personalized pricing? And how would you prove that the model discriminated against them based on a protected element?
- righthand 1y agoAll of them as they’re being used to compete and discriminate against each other.
- chollida1 1y agoThat's not really how it works in the US. You have to prove that you were dicriminated against based on a protected class. Everyone getting different prices doesn't mean its illegal:)
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- stult 1y agoYou can’t charge black people systemically different prices than white people, for example. Neither better nor worse prices. Proving causality would likely be the hard part, but a systematic survey of disparate pricing could show disparate impact. AI models frequently are invisibly biased on race because of some feature that operates as a proxy measure that the developers don’t recognize. eg something as simple as ZIP code combined with a name is a highly reliable predictor of race, and there are many similar, far more subtle ways bias can creep into a model.
- scarface_74 1y agoYou’re assuming that we have a functional government that doesn’t turn a blind eye to discrimination.
- SilverElfin 1y agoHow can anyone allege discrimination when all you have is an AI telling you the price you get? It’s not open source and you don’t get to see data across all races or sexes or whatever to spot a pattern. I think we just need new regulations and laws. Maybe make income or wealth a protected trait you cannot discriminate on. Or require transparency and reporting on algorithmic pricing. Or higher taxes for businesses that use these tactics. But that’s years away, if ever. I bet all airlines will do this. I’ll just fly even less
- pavlov 1y ago> “make income or wealth a protected trait you cannot discriminate on” Seems like that would be problematic for progressive tax rates. Honestly it’s pretty clever. “Wealth is a protected class” would fit right in with the modern right-wing rhetoric, continuing the inversion theme already established with “actually whites are the targets of racism” and “actually Christians are persecuted in the West”, etc.