New campaign calls on retailers to reject surveillance pricing and on lawmakers to ban it

Fight for the Future has launched a new petition calling on retailers to renounce surveillance pricing and for lawmakers to pass legislation prohibiting the practice.

Surveillance pricing is a new term being used to describe a new practice companies are deploying both online and in stores. They gather personal information, build a profile of individuals, and then use AI to predict the highest price shoppers will pay for a product, even showing each customer a different price tag. This practice will allow for price gouging at an entirely new level than ever experienced, and can allow companies to set discriminatory prices as well.

While surveillance pricing sounds like a dystopian nightmare, companies are already experimenting with it: “Uber has allegedly charged customers with low battery power more for the same rides as people with fully charged phones,” the petition reads. Brick-and-mortar retailers are price targeting customers using “digital loyalty programs, which provide individualized coupons.” These programs are designed to maximize the collection of personal data and the profits of companies using it.

Opposition to surveillance pricing schemes is growing. Fight for the Future is launching this petition soon after Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib published a letter to Kroger, voicing concern that the store’s facial recognition and electronic price tags would be used to implement dynamic pricing and gouge vulnerable customers. The Congresswoman raised issues with the reliability and racially discriminatory impact of facial recognition technology.

“We share Representative Tlaib’s concerns that surveillance pricing will raise prices while violating the privacy and civil rights of shoppers,” said Jibran at Fight for the Future. “Companies shouldn’t be digitally conniving about how much they can get out of an exhausted single mom for the only breakfast cereal her toddler will eat, or the price of diapers that she needs. Retailers must take an ethical stand and reject this practice, and it’s long past time for lawmakers to pass policies to protect our data from this kind of abuse.”

###