The Federal Trade Commission announced this week that the agency is seeking public comment about a new policy document on surveillance pricing, warning companies that they could be breaking the law if they use personal data to charge consumers higher prices. It was a surprise move for President Donald Trump’s administration, which killed a Biden-era FTC study on surveillance pricing in 2025.
But there’s one thing about the new FTC announcement that’s very different from how President Joe Biden’s administration handled the topic of surveillance pricing. Trump’s FTC doesn’t call it surveillance pricing at all. They call it personalized pricing. And it’s an interesting move that seems to already be having real-world implications about how the issue is discussed in the media.
“The FTC does not have the legal authority to ban personalized pricing in all circumstances, but businesses that fail to tell consumers how their personal data is being used to set a price may be in violation of the FTC Act and other laws we enforce,” FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson said in a statement.
“We are seeking public input on this draft statement, which would put businesses engaged in or considering personalized pricing on notice that the Trump-Vance FTC will not hesitate to enforce the law in this space,” Ferguson continued.
That simple statement seemed to cause a shift in the national discussion on the topic. News outlets from CBS News to PBS used the term personalized pricing this week after the FTC announcement. PBS used the term surveillance pricing back in Dec. 2025. CBS News used the term surveillance pricing as recently as last month.
Surveillance pricing has become a hot-button issue in recent years as companies deploy technology in new ways to squeeze every last penny out of consumers. Instacart got heat in 2025 for charging some customers up to nearly 25% more for the same item. And Delta has also received criticism for its AI-driven pricing strategy in recent years, along with other airlines.
Charging customers more for various items based on data that’s been collected on them is no longer limited by primitive internet tech that may have existed 20 years ago. AI’s ability to sift through enormous amounts of data and draw connections opens new worlds of possibility. The only thing that can constrain this type of behavior is government intervention.
There’s been public backlash, and it’s been surprisingly bipartisan, as a congressional hearing from earlier this month demonstrated. Republicans and Democrats alike criticized surveillance pricing as predatory during a hearing held by the Senate Judiciary Committee titled, “Your Data, Their Profit: the Consumer Cost of AI Surveillance Pricing.”
The senators repeatedly talked about it as surveillance pricing, with Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri insisting, “AI surveillance pricing is the unholy trinity of everything Americans hate: spying on people, ripping them off, and taking away jobs.”
But the FTC’s announcement this week is clearly shifting the way it’s discussed. Even groups that have historically not been shy about discussing surveillance pricing have been adopting the FTC’s label in the wake of its announcement. Consumer Reports released a statement to Gizmodo on Wednesday that criticized the FTC for not going far enough, but still used the FTC’s new preferred framing with “personalized pricing.”
“The draft statement from the FTC makes clear that if companies personalize prices without adequate disclosure to the consumer, it likely violates Section 5 of the FTC Act, which prohibits unfair or deceptive acts or practices affecting commerce,” the statement from Consumer Reports reads.
The organization also used the term “individualized prices,” another term that’s far more neutral than surveillance pricing.
“Today’s proposed statement emphasizes that companies should provide detailed disclosures when using personal data to set individualized prices—including which pieces of data about a consumer they use to modify a price. For those disclosures to be useful, consumers also need to understand if the price they are seeing is higher or lower than the original price, or the average price.
Beyond the nomenclature, Consumer Reports objects to the idea that the FTC would put the onus on the consumer and that it would somehow be acceptable as long as they’re informed that their information is being used to set prices.
“Ultimately though, it should not be consumers’ responsibility to read detailed disclosures on each item while shopping online to avoid being hit with a higher price,” the statement read. “Instead, the FTC, Congress, and states should take action to prohibit companies from using consumers’ individual data to personalize prices in the first place. Consumer Reports has been proud to support several bills that do just that. We look forward to working with the FTC on this critical consumer protection issue.”
Biden administration launched an investigation into surveillance pricing in 2024 under FTC Chair Lina Kahn, known as a fierce advocate of consumer rights. But the Trump administration stopped that study in 2025 in a clear favor to private business interests. The FTC’s current half-hearted attempt to say it’s against “personalized pricing” is clearly a way to signal that it cares about the issue in the lead up to the midterms, even if Trump and his buddies clearly don’t give a shit.
This issue isn’t going away anytime soon, as we can see from states adopting laws to regulate the practice. If you hear the term “personalized pricing” a lot more than surveillance pricing, you can bet that Trump and other business interests are winning the battle.
Read the full article here
