Two people open the same shopping site, at the same moment, and look at the same product. One sees $89. The other sees $104. Neither of them knows.
That’s surveillance pricing: setting a price for you personally, based on what a company has worked out about you. Not supply and demand. Not a sale that ends at midnight. A price calculated from your data — and it’s now the subject of a US Senate hearing and legislation in more than twenty states.
On 4 August 2026, the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Counterterrorism held a hearing titled “Your Data, Their Profit: The Consumer Cost of AI Surveillance Pricing.” Senator Josh Hawley, who chaired it, described the practice as “the unholy trinity of everything America hates” and said he expects to introduce federal legislation. During the hearing, one major grocery retailer was reported to have earned around $500 million in revenue from selling harvested customer data.
This article explains what surveillance pricing actually is, the specific technical signals used to identify you, and what you can realistically do about it.
What surveillance pricing actually means
It helps to separate two things that often get confused.
Dynamic pricing is old and mostly uncontroversial. Airline seats cost more at Christmas. Hotel rooms cost more during a festival. Ride fares rise in the rain. The price moves with market conditions, and everyone shopping at that moment sees the same number.
Surveillance pricing is different in one crucial way: the price moves with you. Two people shopping at the same second can be quoted different amounts because a system has decided one of them will tolerate paying more.
What might push your price up? Any signal suggesting you’re less price-sensitive or more likely to buy anyway:
- The device you’re on — historically, users on premium hardware have been shown higher-priced options
- Where you appear to be located, down to the neighbourhood
- Whether you’ve looked at this product before, and how many times
- How urgently you seem to be shopping — a one-way flight tomorrow reads differently from a holiday in five months
- Your purchase history, and whether you’ve ever abandoned a basket over price
- Battery level, in some reported cases — a phone about to die suggests someone who can’t shop around
The uncomfortable part isn’t that it’s futuristic. It’s that the data required is collected as a matter of routine, by nearly every site you visit.
How they know it’s you — the part nobody explains
Most coverage of surveillance pricing skips the mechanism. It’s worth understanding, because it tells you which defences actually work and which are theatre.
You don’t have to log in for a site to recognise you. Here’s what your browser hands over automatically, before you click anything:
1. Your IP address
Every site you visit sees it. It reveals your approximate location — usually your city and region — plus your internet provider. That alone supports geographic price discrimination, and it’s why the same booking site can show different fares to visitors from different areas.
2. Your device and browser fingerprint
This is the one people underestimate. Your browser reveals your operating system, screen resolution, timezone, language, installed fonts, CPU cores, available memory, and — through a technique called canvas fingerprinting — a signature derived from how your specific graphics hardware renders an image.
Combined, these details form a near-unique identifier. Not quite a name, but often specific enough to recognise you across sites and sessions. Critically, it works even with cookies disabled and in private browsing mode, which is why “I use incognito” is not the protection most people assume.
If you’d like to see exactly what your own browser is handing over right now, we built a page that shows you: what this website already knows about you. It reads the data live, displays it, and stores none of it — which is precisely the point, because almost every other site does keep it.
3. Data purchased from brokers
Beyond what your browser leaks, there’s an entire industry selling personal profiles: income estimates, home ownership, family status, purchase history, location patterns. That $500 million figure from the hearing wasn’t a rounding error — customer data is a genuine revenue line for large retailers.
Together, these three layers mean a company can form a fairly confident view of who you are, what you can afford, and how badly you want the thing you’re looking at — before you’ve typed a single character.
What’s being done about it
The regulatory picture is moving unusually quickly, and unusually across party lines.
Federal. The FTC issued an advance notice of proposed rulemaking in April 2026 covering total price disclosure, fee transparency, personalised pricing disclosure and unauthorised billing. Senator Hawley’s August hearing signalled forthcoming legislation, and a follow-up hearing examined AI shopping assistants — a fresh legal grey area, since an agent shopping on your behalf can be profiled too.
State level. This is where the action is. More than 40 bills across at least 24 states now address surveillance pricing. New York’s Algorithmic Pricing Disclosure Act, effective July 2025, was the first enacted — it requires disclosure when a price has been set using personal data. Maryland followed with the Protection from Predatory Pricing Act in 2026. California, Illinois, Vermont and Connecticut have bills in progress.
Two broad approaches are emerging: disclosure models, which permit the practice but require companies to admit when they’re doing it, and prohibition models, which ban personalised pricing based on certain protected data outright.
Neither helps you today, in a shop, right now. So:
What you can actually do
Honest framing first: you cannot fully opt out of this, and anyone claiming otherwise is selling something. But you can meaningfully reduce how identifiable and how targetable you are.
Reduce the signals you send
- Use a VPN to mask your IP address and therefore your location. This is the single most effective step against geographic price discrimination. It does not hide your browser fingerprint.
- Block trackers. A tracker-blocking extension or a privacy-focused browser cuts the cross-site profile that follows you between shops.
- Understand what private browsing does. It clears cookies and history locally. It does not hide your IP address or your fingerprint. It is not anonymity.
- Log out before browsing. An account is the strongest identifier of all — it links your session directly to your full purchase history.
Break the pattern
- Compare across devices. Check the same product on your phone and your laptop, on mobile data and home Wi-Fi. If the prices differ, you’ve found personalisation in action.
- Don’t circle the same product repeatedly. Repeat views signal intent, and intent is exactly what pricing systems reward with a higher number.
- Clear cookies between comparison sessions, or use a separate browser profile for shopping.
- Take your time where you can. Urgency is the most reliably punished signal there is.
Shrink your data footprint
The profiles used to price you are built partly from broker data, and you can remove yourself from a good deal of it. Our free opt-out directory walks through the major data brokers one at a time, with current links — it takes an hour or two and it reduces what’s available to buy about you.
The wider point
Surveillance pricing is the clearest illustration yet of something abstract becoming concrete. “Companies collect your data” is easy to shrug at. “You paid $15 more than the person next to you, because of what they know about you” is not.
What makes it hard to fight is its invisibility. You never see the other price. There’s no receipt showing what you might have paid. Which is exactly why disclosure requirements are at the centre of nearly every bill now moving through state legislatures.
Until those laws arrive, the practical defence is the same one that protects you from most data-driven harms: send fewer signals, and know what you’re sending.
See it for yourself: our live browser reveal shows exactly what a website learns about you the moment you open it — no signup, and we save none of it. You can also test how well you spot a scam, or browse our plain-English guides to privacy and security.
Sources: US Senate Committee on the Judiciary hearing “Your Data, Their Profit: The Consumer Cost of AI Surveillance Pricing” (4 August 2026); FTC advance notice of proposed rulemaking (14 April 2026); New York Algorithmic Pricing Disclosure Act; Maryland Protection from Predatory Pricing Act.