When does price discrimination go too far?

[Neo-Malthusian Misanthrope]

Data mining is definitely a method to reach so-called perfect price discrimination - if you can match every person's preference with a fake amazon storefront charging different prices for the same product via manipulating search results, then whoever is running the algorithm can capture the entire consumer surplus if their data is accurate enough. I think this is also a tiny bit beyond facebook or google ads funneling people towards different prices - those require you to click on an ad which you might have blocked, whereas with a search, you're explicitly looking for something, and I believe people tell you to use incognito mode to search for flights for exactly that reason. Of course, some people might wind out ahead with this if they end up getting discounts but that might be wishful thinking, I say while clinging to my spotify and amazon prime student discounts. The cynic in me says the only way to fight back against this is to discourage consumerism in general, not through some kind of taxation scheme but through cultural values, which is obviously easier said than done when whatever you want is a click of a button away plus two-day shipping. I know I'm guilty of this (at least when I have disposable income), worrying about FOMO when a sale comes on or a discontinued item pops up second-hand, but that might be the nature of collecting.

The "everybody gets a discount" model kind of reminds me of Steam sales, where digital goods can get sometimes outrageous discounts compared to their MSRP, but these are games where if my understanding is correct, all costs are sunk and distribution cost is minimal, so every additional sale provides profit. We might not hit that until we're in a theoretical post-scarcity society - until then it's probably more likely that consumers would get price gouged by big data taking such an approach. Excellent question, though! I can definitely see this becoming a legislative frontier at some point in the near future.