Key Findings
- A new class action alleges The Washington Post secretly harvested subscribers’ personal data and behavioral profiles to generate individualized subscription renewal prices, without disclosure to those subscribers.
- The suit alleges that the longer a subscriber stayed loyal to The Post, the more data the paper accumulated about them and the more it charged them at renewal, meaning longtime readers allegedly paid more than new customers for identical access.
- Clarkson Law Firm filed the lawsuit in the Superior Court of the District of Columbia seeking damages and injunctive relief to stop The Washington Post from using personal data to set subscription prices.
WASHINGTON, DC – Today, Clarkson Law Firm, the prominent national public interest firm, filed a class action lawsuit against The Washington Post in the Superior Court of the District of Columbia.
The suit, filed on behalf of Washington Post online subscribers, alleges that the paper, unbeknownst to its subscribers, engaged in a secret surveillance-pricing scheme that conned its readers using an algorithm based on each subscriber’s unique personal data and behavioral profile to set individualized subscription renewal prices. This major legal action comes as Jeff Bezos and The Post are under increasing scrutiny for attempting to justify significant newsroom layoffs and questionable business decisions to increase company profit.
The Washington Post is now one of the latest examples of corporations expanding the use of users’ personal data to feed algorithm-based pricing tools to determine exactly what they think users will pay, enabling them to charge consumers different prices for the same product. This individualized price gouging from The Post – deceiving and exploiting the paper’s digital subscribers – is yet another component of billionaire owner Jeff Bezos’ business model aimed at lining his own pockets and putting profits before people.
“The Washington Post has gone from an iconic institution of journalism to just another profit-obsessed technology company remade in the image of its tech bro billionaire owner and his move-fast-and-break-things mindset of value extraction. The Post’s deeply invasive practice of consumer surveillance is squeezing consumers for all they’ve got through a campaign of deception, rigging the cost of services against the very people keeping these companies in business,” said Ryan Clarkson, founder and managing partner of Clarkson Law Firm. “Consumers did not agree to be surveilled. They did not knowingly sign up to be charged a different amount from their neighbor to read the same newspaper. Discriminatory pricing systems have no place in a fair market, and they need to be dismantled.”
As the complaint details, for years, The Washington Post has covertly harvested its subscribers’ personal data, aggregating and analyzing deeply personal information to create individualized pricing models to determine how much money it could extract from each subscriber to maximize its profits. The more loyal a reader became, the more data The Post could gather to estimate how much more it could price gouge individual subscribers at renewal.
This has resulted in longtime subscribers paying more than new customers simply because Bezos and The Post knew more about them. The Post never disclosed to subscribers what data it was collecting, how extensively it was collecting it, or what it would be used for.
“Surveillance pricing has been widely condemned as unfair and deceptive,” said Kristen Simplicio, partner at Clarkson Law Firm. “The Post’s exploitation of its subscribers shows just how far companies will go to pad their bottom line. Action must be taken. Consumers cannot be left behind to bear the worst of these practices while corporations profit.”
The class action suit seeks to recover damages and obtain declaratory and injunctive relief barring The Washington Post from similar conduct in the future, including, but not limited to, the use of personal data to set subscription prices.
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