Yes to California’s Bill to Ban Surveillance Pricing
Yes to California’s Bill to Ban Surveillance Pricing
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/06/californias-bill-ban-surveillance-pricing
Publish Date: 2026-06-11 15:56:00
Source Domain: www.eff.org
Corporations harvest and monetize ever-growing amounts of our personal data, such as our browsing history and physical location. One bitter fruit of this poisonous tree is known as “surveillance pricing”: corporations offer the same product to two different people at two different prices, based on scrutiny of these people’s respective personal data.
Surveillance pricing is bad for privacy, equity, and price transparency. So EFF supports a California bill, S.B. 2564, which would ban this creepy practice.
How Surveillance Pricing Works
In 2025, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) published a report about the practices of six companies that provide surveillance pricing services to hundreds of other companies, including grocery stores and apparel retailers. The report found that surveillance pricing draws upon customers’ browsing history, physical location, and shopping transaction history. Customers’ data can come from the vendor itself, from its surveillance pricing service provider, or from third-party data brokers. Customers are sorted into groups based on their personal data, as is done for targeted ads. As a result of surveillance pricing, a business might offer two customers different prices for the same product, based for example on whether they are a new parent, or whether they live near a business’s competitor.
As former FTC Chair Lina Khan explained:
Initial staff findings show that retailers frequently use people’s personal information to set targeted, tailored prices for goods and services – from a person’s location and demographics, down to their mouse movements on a webpage.
Unfortunately, the current FTC chair closed the FTC’s portal for public comments regarding surveillance pricing. Fortunately, the California Attorney General has initiated its own investigation of this practice.
Researchers have identified many examples of surveillance pricing:
- The Princeton Review offered people who lived in some zip codes a higher price for…
