How to Stop Surveillance Pricing From Costing You More

The price you see might not be the price everyone gets.

And that's thanks to the hotly-contested practice of surveillance pricing, which allegedly uses your personal data (such as browsing history, location, or shopping behavior) to decide what you're willing to pay.

This practice has been brought back into the limelight as airlines and grocery chains face new scrutiny over how they set prices, and whether some customers are paying more than others. In April 2026, a lawsuit accused JetBlue of using customer data to influence airfare pricing.^[1] Around the same time, lawmakers in Maryland moved to ban so-called “surveillance pricing” in grocery stores altogether.^[2]

So are companies using your personal data to charge you more for the same service?

What is surveillance pricing?

Surveillance pricing, also known as personalized or algorithmic pricing, is a dynamic strategy where companies use a consumer’s personal data and behavior to determine the specific price they will see for a product or service.^[3] It is distinct from dynamic pricing, which adjusts prices based on supply and demand.

Instead of setting one price for everyone, surveillance pricing allegedly factors in things like:

• Your browsing history
• Your location
• Your device (iPhone vs. Android)
• Your purchase habits
• How long you hover over a product
• Whether you abandoned a cart before

A 2025 study by the Federal Trade Commission found, through a series of subpoenas, that companies already track hundreds of behavioral signals, including mouse movements and browsing patterns, across hundreds of retail clients. This infrastructure could easily be used to fine-tune pricing at the individual level, even if companies don’t openly admit doing so.

And we have seen evidence of this before. In 2025, Instacart was investigated by Consumer Reports and Groundwork Collaborative and found that “some grocery prices differed by as much as 23 percent per item from one Instacart customer to the next.” Instacart has since “stopped offering technology that allowed grocery retailers to charge shoppers different prices,” as of December 22, 2025.

Despite this research, the practice remains highly contested, as no definitive proof that individualized pricing is widespread across industries has been presented yet. But the underlying technology already exists, and may be in use in limited ways.

At its core, surveillance pricing is less about the product's market value and more about your private data and what it says about your willingness to pay for it.

Why surveillance pricing is a privacy issue

Even if it’s not fully proven at scale, surveillance pricing raises serious concerns because of what it requires behind the scenes. To work, companies need to build detailed online profiles about you without your clear, informed consent.

And here’s the catch: Opting out of cookies isn’t enough anymore.

Modern tracking methods, such as browser fingerprinting and logged-in sessions, can still identify you, even if you clear cookies or use private browsing. It’s the same ecosystem that powers things like targeted advertising, data brokers, cross-site tracking, so on.

In the worst-case scenario, it could also enable forms of price discrimination, such as:

• Higher prices in lower-income areas
• Different prices based on device type
• Surge pricing during emergencies or urgent searches

Again, not all of this is confirmed or widespread. But the capability is there, and regulators are taking it seriously.

How to protect yourself

Since surveillance pricing relies on tracking, the best defense is simply to limit how much data companies can collect about you.

Here’s what actually helps:

1. Use an ad blocker to block trackers

Basic cookie pop-ups won’t stop advanced tracking — the scripts that collect behavioral data load before you ever get a chance to opt-out. Ad blockers that include tracker blocking can prevent those scripts from loading in the first place, nipping the issue in the bud entirely.

Look for an ad blocker that blocks both ad server and tracker server calls, not just banner ads. Browser extensions are the easiest way to get coverage across your everyday browsing.

See our picks for the best ad blockers.

2. Use a VPN to hide your location

Your IP address is one of the most important data points used in setting up your consumer profile. Unprotected, it reveals your approximate location, your internet provider, and creates a consistent identifier that follows you across sites.

A virtual private network (VPN) replaces your real IP with one from the VPN's server, breaking that thread.

It's not a complete cloak, but it removes one of the most reliable signals retailers use to segment users. Combined with tracker blocking, the two together make it significantly harder to build a stable profile on you.

See our picks for the best VPNs.

3. Remove your data from broker databases

Even if you start blocking tracking today, companies may already hold years of data about you through third-party data brokers — the intermediaries that buy, aggregate, and sell consumer profiles. A data removal service requests deletion of your information from these databases, reducing the historical data available to feed profiling systems.

This won't stop real-time behavioral tracking, so it works best as a complement to the tools above rather than a standalone fix. It chips away at the underlying profile that makes surveillance pricing possible.

See our picks for the best data removal tools.

Bottom line

Although surveillance pricing hasn’t been fully proven across industries, it’s not a fiction either. Research from trusted sources like the FTC has already shown that companies are collecting the kind of detailed behavioral data needed to make it possible.

And lawmakers are responding.

The best way to avoid getting ripped off by surveillance pricing is to limit how much data companies can collect about you by using tools like a VPN and a tracker-blocking ad blocker.

FAQs