Surveillance Pricing Is Personalized Price Gouging

Corporations Are Using Your Personal Data to Charge You More Money

Last year, a Federal Trade Commission investigation found that companies were setting online prices based on consumer data ranging “from a person’s location and demographics, down to their mouse movements on a webpage.” People are paying different amounts—and even earning different wages—based on what corporations know about them and what AI systems decide. If that sounds concerning to you, you’re not alone. In a new blog post, Roosevelt Director of Corporate Power and Financial Regulation Brad Lipton discusses the harms of “surveillance pricing” and how state and federal policymakers are trying to regulate it.

Representatives Greg Casar and Rashida Tlaib introduced legislation last week to ban pricing and wage-setting based on “surveillance data,” defined in the bill as “personal information, genetic information, behavior, or biometrics.” Also last week, a group of senators sent a letter to Delta Airlines probing its use of AI to set individualized fares—a practice that not only raises concerns about data privacy, but slams Americans with higher costs at a time of economic uncertainty.

App-based gig work platforms are also using surveillance wage-setting to squeeze money from workers. In a Roosevelt brief released last year, Katie Wells and Funda Ustek Spilda found that nurses were competing against each other by offering bids for work, indicating the lowest hourly rate they’re willing to accept, in a race to the bottom for wages facilitated and encouraged by the platforms.

“Technology is rapidly reshaping how corporations treat consumers and workers,” Lipton writes in his blog post. “Ultimately, it will be up to our democracy—not just corporations—to decide how we expect companies to treat people with these new tools.”

Read the blog post: “Keeping an Eye on Surveillance Pricing and Wage Legislation”

What We’re Talking About

What We’re Reading

• This week, the Roosevelt Network released its 2025 Emerging Fellows Journal, a collection of bold policy proposals written by undergraduate student fellows.
  • This year’s collection features research on worker-led industrial strategy, extreme heat in urban areas, and the corporate-fueled erosion of democracy in higher education.
• Roosevelt Fellow Rachel Rebouché spoke to the Washington Post about the legal fights among states over abortion pills: “The whole point of these prosecutions [is] to publicly dissuade and chill people from mailing medication abortion across the country.”
  • Next week, Rebouché and economist Kate Bahn will be joining the Roosevelt Institute for a virtual discussion about how the constraints of the post-Dobbs landscape are shaping our economy and democracy.
• A New Yorker feature dives into why no taxes on tips is a policy beloved by the bigwigs of the restaurant industry—but won’t actually do much for tipped workers.