EPIC Joins Groups Urging FTC to Crack Down on Hidden Surveillance Pricing

This week, EPIC joined a group of national consumer protection and privacy groups to urge the Federal Trade Commission to crack down on hidden surveillance pricing. The groups called on the FTC to initiate a rulemaking that would require companies to tell consumers when they are using surveillance pricing. This would be an important step in the fight to protect the public from an unfair and invasive practice that often happens without consumers’ knowledge.

Companies engage in surveillance pricing to set an individualized price for each consumer, feeding personal data into machine-learning algorithms to identify how much the consumer individual is willing to pay for a good or service. Businesses have used surveillance pricing in alarming ways, such as to increase grocery costs and to charge people in Asian-American-majority ZIP codes more for test prep services. Other troubling uses are possible, such as charging people more for flights when it is clear they are traveling for a funeral.

Surveillance pricing is a threat to privacy and fairness in the marketplace, especially when it is hidden from consumers. People have a right to know whether they are paying more for the same products and services than others are. Knowing this information can help consumers decide whether to purchase from a given company, to know who has their data and what it is being used for, and to test whether prices are being set in a way that violates fairness laws.

EPIC has been urging lawmakers to regulate surveillance pricing and is helping states defend regulations in court.