Picture two shoppers buying the same gallon of milk from the same grocery chain on the same afternoon. One pays more. Not because of a coupon, a sale or a loyalty card — because the store’s software decided she’d pay it.
That’s not a hypothetical I dreamed up. It’s one of the examples in the Federal Trade Commission’s proposed enforcement policy statement on personalized pricing.
The agency’s definition, in its own words: “the use of personal data to set prices according to the amount that a company believes an individual consumer is willing to spend.”
I’ve spent 35+ years watching companies find new ways to separate you from your money. This one’s different. It doesn’t raise prices for everybody. It raises them for you, specifically, based on what a computer thinks it knows about you.
The good news: The FTC is asking what you think, and on Sept. 3, it extended the deadline to Sept. 25. Here’s what the proposal says, what companies already know about you and how to fight back starting today.
How they know what you’ll pay
This didn’t come out of nowhere. In July 2024, the FTC ordered eight companies — including Mastercard, JPMorgan Chase, Accenture and McKinsey — to explain what it called “surveillance pricing.”
The agency wanted to know how location, demographics, credit history and browsing or shopping history get turned into an individual price tag.
The initial findings, released in January 2025, were worse than I expected. The middlemen studied worked with at least 250 retail clients, including grocery and clothing stores. The data they used ranged from your precise location and demographics down to your mouse movements on a webpage.
Also on the list: browser history, search activity, which products you lingered on and whether you abandoned a shopping cart.
One scenario in the staff report: A shopper the system pegs as a new parent gets shown higher-priced baby thermometers first in search results. That’s the whole game. You never see the cheaper option, so you never know you were steered.
What the FTC is proposing
The proposed statement doesn’t ban charging different people different prices. What it targets is a company hiding the fact that it’s doing it.
Under the proposal, a company breaks the law when it claims or implies a price is fixed or widely offered when it’s actually personalized. Staying silent counts too: If a reasonable shopper would assume everyone pays the same, and the company knows better and says nothing, that’s deception by omission.
The FTC also says a half-disclosure doesn’t cut it. Telling you a price was “specially selected” for you, without explaining why, is misleading. A real disclosure has to be clear and conspicuous and say the price is personalized, on what basis and using what data.
Then there’s unfairness. The agency says a hidden personalized price can cause substantial injury you can’t reasonably avoid, because you have no way to change your behavior, correct bad data or stop the data collection if you don’t know it’s happening.
The examples the FTC lists as potential violations tell you exactly what the agency is worried about:
- A grocery delivery service charging more for milk because its data shows several kids live in your house.
- A hotel charging more because data suggests you’re traveling for a funeral.
- A rideshare app charging more for a trip to the hospital because data suggests a medical emergency.
- A rideshare app charging more because you haven’t installed any competitor’s app.
- A retailer charging more for a security camera because court records show you were recently a crime victim.
- A retailer’s website charging more because your phone reveals you’re standing in one of its stores or its parking lot.
FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson put the principle simply: “When consumers see a listed price, they expect it to be same price that everyone else sees.”
There are two things that the FTC says are fine: prices that rise and fall with supply and demand for everybody in the same market, and prices that vary by region because of taxes or local conditions. Insurance and credit, which are priced on individual risk by nature, are also carved out.
One more thing worth knowing. The agency explicitly says it’s taking no position yet on whether personalized pricing is unfair even when fully disclosed. In other words, this proposal is about the sneaking, not the practice itself. That’s a reason to comment, not a reason to shrug.
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How to fight back
The FTC’s own statement names the tools shoppers can use to dodge personalized prices, if they know the prices are personalized: a virtual private network, private browsing, switching to a retailer with one price for everyone or simply walking away. Here’s how I’d put those into practice.
1. Shop logged out, then compare
Your account is the richest file a retailer has on you: every purchase, every return, every product you stared at. Before a big purchase, open a private or incognito window, stay logged out and check the price. Then log in and check again.
2. Use a second browser and clear your cookies
The FTC found companies tracking browser history and search activity. Cookies are how that follows you around. Keep one browser for browsing and a clean one for buying, or clear cookies before a big purchase. A VPN, which the FTC specifically mentions, hides your location too.
3. Check the price on your phone and your computer
Different devices, different data trails. It takes 30 seconds to pull up the same item on both. The FTC’s own example of a retailer charging more when your phone shows you’re in its parking lot tells you the device in your pocket is doing the talking.
4. Don’t count on the abandoned-cart discount
Plenty of people leave items in a cart hoping a coupon shows up. The FTC’s findings list cart abandonment as a behavior retailers track — period. Nothing says it earns you a discount. If it works for you, fine. Just know you’re feeding the machine either way.
5. Try a different ZIP code for store pickup
Where a retailer lets you choose a pickup location, switch to a store across town and see whether the price moves. The FTC says regional differences based on local taxes and conditions are legitimate.
But if the price changes with nothing but a ZIP code, you know what you’re dealing with. Pick the cheaper store.
6. Use price trackers, and complain when something smells wrong
Price-tracking browser extensions and sites show what an item has sold for over time, which makes a personalized markup easier to spot.
And if a price changes when you log out, report it to the FTC at ReportFraud.ftc.gov, the agency’s complaint portal. Those complaints are what regulators point to when they decide whether to act.
How to file a comment by Sept. 25
The FTC gets thousands of comments from industry lawyers. It gets far fewer from actual shoppers. Yours counts.
Go to regulations.gov and open docket FTC-2026-1057. Find the comment button on the proposed policy statement, write what you think and submit.
You don’t need a lawyer or a form letter. Tell the agency whether you’d want to know when a price was set just for you, and whether disclosure alone is enough.
I’ve watched the government kill consumer protections when nobody spoke up, and I’ve watched digital price tags and hidden online fees creep in while everyone was looking elsewhere. This time you’ve got two weeks and a working link. Use them.
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