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Browser cookies can affect what price a vendor offers something for

vailr

vailr

Diamond Member
Text
Good Cookies?

My comment in the last issue ("Bugs and Beacons: Bah!"
http://www.langa.com/current.htm#3 ) that most Cookies and "Web Bugs"
are actually beneficial brought some interesting mail, too:

Fred: About useful cookies. I'd been visiting buy.com for
months to check their price on Kodak's EasyShare DX3900
digital camera. The price recently fell to under $300. Then, I
deleted buy.com's permanently stored cookie from my hard
drive. When I returned to buy.com, the price of the camera had
shot back up by $50! I let the site place another cookie on my
hard drive & checked the price of the camera again it had
dropped $21 but still was priced about $30 higher than before
I'd deleted that cookie. I had no idea a cookie could be so
valuable to me. --- William G. Laine

One of the most common uses of Cookies is to track "returning visitors"
to a site: Depending on when you were last on a site, and what pages you
visited when you were there, you may be shown custom content that varies
visit to visit. For example, in this case, it appears that the site is
set up to reward returning visitors with an automatic markdown--- a kind
of private sale. Delete the Cookie, and you lose access to the automatic
markdown.
 
Yeah, I noticed this at Office Depot. I loggen in and checked a price, and then went to use a coupon and when I got to checkout the price was $10 higher. It stayed that way too until I deleted my cookies and re-logged in. Pretty nasty trick.
 
The best thing about Office Depot is that when you check stock on an item, it's there, and when you apply a coupon, it's not
 
i think OD tracks both your machine(mac address) and ip address.
i learned about this when i tried to buy 2 $50 items, by using the $10 off $50 on each.
it wouldn't let me order twice even if i change my zip code or use another account.
and if you keep on trying, the item will show as not in stock 🙁
 
I highly doubt that any online company tracks their customer by MAC address. Doesnt the sheer number of addresses make it unrealistic?
 
Good thread - anyone up for some cookie hacking? 🙂

Just make your buy.com cookie say you have visited the site 3,487 times and watch those prices fall!
 
I noticed this at Best Buy. Remember the cheap Crucial DDR? I had a stick in my basket, but Best Buy wouldn't deliver it and all my local stores were sold out. About 3 months later it was still in my basket for the same price ($30 I think), while prices on the website were around $90 a piece! I changed my quantity to 3 and bought them. Before anyone jumps on me for stealing, I actually called Best Buy and was told they would honor the price since it WAS in my basket. At any rate, I thought about loading up an HDTV set and changing the cookies to reflect a $100 price, but that would be WRONG! 😉

I did a bit of research into it, but lost interest after awhile!
 
Your MAC address never gets past your router/cable modem/dsl modem. And his MAC address never gets past the next router upstream, repeat until y ou hit a T1 or similar that doesn't even use MAC addresses because it ain't ethernet.
 
dongky..did you delete the previous batch of session cookies?...anyway your temp internet explorer files(webpages stored there) also can contain identifying tags(uh...cookies..lol)
 
I don't understand how a cookie can control the price of the item. Wouldn't the site refer to the item number and retrieve the current price in their database? Just to verify, I went to BestBuy and added an item to my cart and then changed the cookie's price and the temp html file. I then went back to BestBuy and at the top where it says "items in cart" it reflected the changes I made but the lower portion for the description of the items reflects the accurate price. Please clarify so I know if I need to keep an I on my items in my carts prices in case I go back to purchase items at a later date.
 
We can not be specific here. Every site has some custom softwrae. This can be implemented differently at each
site so we can not make claims about what each site does without specific info regarding that site.

It would be unusual for a sites characteristics to change on a frequent basis (cost of custom programming is too high) unless
the company was experiencing extreme losses.

We shoudl be able to target and perhaps have a thread on each of the popular sites so that we can learn from each other
how that specific site works.
 
Isn't all the cookie data encrypted from the companies respective site? How could you find out what all those jumbled numbers even mean?
 
Jah Wren, please elaborate on MAC addresses. My DSL ISP (bellsouth) registers a single MAC address per account and I can verify that they won't provide an IP address to any other MAC on that line. I was under the impression that MAC addresses could be read downstream.

Thanks, ED
 
Guys, bear in mind that if you can edit your cookies in a manner to lower prices, it would likely add up to mail/wire fraud and there would be a very nice paper-trail as well. Doesn't seem like a good idea to me.
 
Hey FLFastEd

You don't state if you have a home network setup. But go to www.grc.com and run the "Shields Up" test. If your port is open it
will tell you the MAC address it sees.

MAC addresses are unique (supposed to be anyway) to each network device in the world. If they weren't we would have
conflicts as our data is swung around the Internet.
 
I doubt that their cookies would store any of the vital information right there on your computer. I would only have the cookie store an encrypted user ID, which would then be referenced against something in the company databases. That would be safer than having everything right there in the cookie for AT'ers to mess with! 🙂
 
Well, I major in Marketing and right now a lot of academia people are trying to set up an Internet price-discrimination model. The ideal model is that everyone will be offered a different price which is your max reservation price, i.e. the maximum price you are willing to pay. This would be based on your previous visits and purchases, traceable by your cookie. Your browsing behavior also gives out a lot about your purchase intention. For example, checking out an item again and again states that you are very likely to purchase this product, therefore they are going to give you a little incentive to speed up your purchase. In general, if you are identified as a "deal-prone" customer, they are going to offer you a lower price. If you are identified as a "loyal" customer, i.e. you will buy from them no matter what, they are going to charge you a higher price.

Of course, this is purely therectical and the trick is that you can't let people know that you are doing price discrimination, which, with information spreading on the Internet at the speed of light, is quite impossible, esp. if you are among the "big guys". Amazon once tried the "high-price-for-loyal-customer" strategy and really burnt themselve when peole found out and complaints started to pour in. They had to abandon this strategy (or did they).

To sum it up, it is inevitable for the online retailers to try price discrimination one way or another, since it is so easy to do. But for those savvy shoppers, you always know what to do to get a good deal. 😉
 
Snatchface, I doubt that editing cookies to increase the number of visits and lower a price would ever make a case in court for fraud. If any company tried to sue someone for editing their cookies they would likely be countersued for price discrimination.
 


<< The best thing about Office Depot is that when you check stock on an item, it's there, and when you apply a coupon, it's not >>

Thats why i buy the item online in stock, and right after call and apply the coupon code# works 99.9% of the time...
"69" Feed your mind
 
I had gotten different prices on the same books at BAMM.COM (wal-mart-owned version of amazon books) on the same day. I had jumped to it as a new customer from a price comparison site. That variable pricing was annoying. I didn't have to manually delete any cookies to get that variable pricing. After awhile, I wasn't able to get the prices to vary anymore no matter how much I jumped around or deleted the cookies. So, I assume it might have gotten fed up trying to coax me to buy more books.

As for privacy, there are plenty of things a server can find out. Some sites used your processor serial number (aka CPU ID) to determine individual machines. Some sites that demonstrate some of the things that can be tracked to determine who you are (and thus how to set the prices on the website for you). One such site is:

http://www.antionline.com/fight-back/What_Information_Can_The_Websites_I_Visit_Find_Out_About_Me.php

Some types of info can be fetched even if you are hiding behind a firewall. If not, the site might load or update a plugin certificate for your browser. There was a site that proved that a site could read a different site's cookies that were stored on your machine, but I have forgotten that URL. It had been posted in the dvdtalk thread on privacy long ago. Another demonstration that looks into the contents of your machine to determine who you are is at:

Browser Spy

Actually, some of these privacy demo sites are useful if you've forgotten some of the inner stuff of your PC and want to remember your identification information or what was installed on your machine....
 


<< If they (MAC addresses) weren't (unique) we would have conflicts as our data is swung around the Internet. >>


The worst thing about forums are people talking about things they dont understand, no offense, really, no offense. MAC address are only used by layer 2 (of the OSI networking model) devices (eg. switches, bridges). They in no way have any function for routing data about the internet. They are simply used by switches to form a MAC address table in order to direct packets to a certain port on the switch instead of broadcasting them to all ports like a hub would. It is true, however, that all MAC addresses are unique hexadecimal numbers (xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx) consisting of a vendor code (the first 3 sets) and then a device number (the last 3).

IP addresses are what allow data to be routed on the internet. It is routed on layer 3 devices, like a router (suprise!). The hierarchial structure of the IP address space allows for effecient routing that would not be possible with MAC addresses. Sometimes ISPs use MAC addresses to limit your internet access from devices (eg. if you buy a new computer, new network card, or are accessing the internet from a different computer, you would have to register the new MAC address with the ISP for access priviledges).

From what I know about ARP tables and ARP and RARP lookups, I do not believe it is possible to derive someones MAC address from their IP address unless you are on their local subnet. If I am wrong, please correct me.

As for the cookie issue, any respectable ecommerce site would not used cookie-based pricing. Sure, the items in your shopping cart are stored in cookies but no store or software developer in their right mind would trust any data from the client. Once you check out, the items that are in your basket are read by the server and then the prices are queried and totals are calculated ONLY once you have hit submit after entering in all your credit card info and what not. While we're on the topic, I hated a couple months ago when everyone was freaking out about "COOKIES!" and privacy and what not. Feel free to track my websites (its not like other sites can cross-read over to other domain's cookies...well then again...), feel free to use demographic info to target ads to me that i mite actually like, i dont really care! 🙂

Once again, I just want to educate if I can...hope I helped.

-Jon
 
Wan't it Amazon that was doing this before or was it buy.com. I know they took alot of bad press and in the end they said it was just a marketing experiment.
 


<< Guys, bear in mind that if you can edit your cookies in a manner to lower prices, it would likely add up to mail/wire fraud and there would be a very nice paper-trail as well. Doesn't seem like a good idea to me. >>



No way they could prove anything - let alone catch you. This is assuming that the cookie only stores the amount of times you visited the store (there is NO WAY anyone is dumb enough to store prices in a cookie). So what we can do is hax0r the cookie and add a few hundred visits to the site to get a lower price. To say that is fraud is the same as saying using the refresh button is fraud because you are delibertly making your visits higher. I doubt anyone can make such a claim (let alone catch you).
 
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