What about car insurance? Is it ok to charge more to insure teenage drivers?
If the underlying cost of the service is legitimately and significantly affected by age, sure, charge accordingly. Tinder's case seems different.
The examples above are about age because any rules about age at least apply more or less consistently to all people as people age over time. I'm not saying that doing the same kind of pricing by other personal traits such as race or gender or eye color would be ok, just so that we're clear.
Consider their COGS to be user acquisition costs. Serve too many unattractive people and those costs go up as people leave the platform.
With the amount of data they have, I'm sure you could reliably estimate the cost of any given profiles being shown to any other given profile.
This could be used to determine who profiles are shown to, and how often. One implication is that attractive but dead accounts will be shown more often to unattractive but highly active accounts. Another is that unattractive but highly active accounts must be charged more to maintain the same margins.
I am equivocating attractiveness with age here, but presumably there would be too much public outcry if they charged by attractiveness alone, so they my guess is they use age as a proxy.
And tbh the whole attractiveness argument smells a lot like how black people were considered unattractive customers that would make it harder to sell to white customers in real estate transactions in 1950s America.
It's not unreasonable that marketing a fair platform would cost more than a discriminatory one, just as it's not unreasonable that e.g. mitigating pollution at a factory costs money.
Regulations should address such things to level the playing field of course, but shit companies trying to sneak in practices like this should be condemned.
In practice this argument leads to insurance companies charging thousands per year for all new drivers, and then giving discounts to drivers willing to install surveillance devices that report all aspects of the driver's driving.
After all, you would never agree to have trackers in your house just so the insurance company can judge if you're a safe home owner and lower your home insurance premium - why agree to it in cars?
As for the G-force tracker - it's also shit, she was getting points docked constantly for "smoothness" of driving, because every time you went through a speed bump the tracker would register "abrupt braking event" and recommend "smoother braking for better scores". It was such a shit system that she willingly paid 2x the premium on her next insurance to not have a tracker.
https://www.carrotinsurance.com/help/what-data-does-the-blac...
> This includes data on speed, smoothness and usage, which all contribute to your total Driving Style Score.
> The black box also enables your car’s GPS location to be identified in the unfortunate event that your car gets stolen.
Consider this: if the first accident happens to an average person after 10 years of driving, young people will take a loooong time to build a driving record that can even be considered average let alone good. And you can't start charging higher rates only after the crash, such rates would need to be so high as to be ompletely prohibitive. Bottom line, young people will never be paying as good a price as older people under any system that has a semblance of fairness to it. Sadly.
(This can get into a really long discussion about a lot of things that can correlate with higher accident rates and how sometimes it's a false correlation, like how in some places black people have more accidents, but it's not because they are black but because they are poorer on average and drive older less safe cars - but filtering by race could be used as a quick filter which is, obviously, unfair(and illegal))
Not the same with gender or race, you're stuck with what you're born with (statistically insignificant numbers of transitions notwithstanding).
I think this is a meaningful, if not perfect, distinction.
I think no. Everyone should shoulder the costs.
It's a difficult one; objectively speaking, cost is a factor of risk, and risk is what insurance is for. But at the same time, it's discrimination based on age - not ALL people who just got their license are reckless.
But if you don’t crash you pay the same as the next regular Joe.