Is Surveillance Pricing Ripping You Off? How to Stop Your Data From Being Used Against You
What Is Surveillance Pricing Anyway?
You may be the victim of surveillance pricing without even knowing it. But what does that even mean?
Surveillance pricing is the increasingly popular practice where some online retailers adjust prices for individuals based on data collected about that person, including browsing history, location, purchase history, and more. They often use third-party intermediaries to adjust those prices.
According to a preliminary report released by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) in early 2025, these third-party intermediaries can even track your mouse movements. But that doesn’t mean there’s nothing you can do about it.1
Key Takeaways
The FTC found that companies collect personal information about online shoppers and use it to tweak the prices they pay for products.
Your browsing habits, geographic location, and more may influence the prices you pay.
You can protect yourself from surveillance pricing by clearing cookies and browsing incognito.
Consider using a virtual private network, or VPN.
Key Findings on Surveillance Pricing
The initial report from the FTC on surveillance pricing reveals that online retailers frequently use personal data, such as browsing history and location, to target consumers with different pricing for the same products.
Based on documents from firms like Mastercard and Accenture, the FTC showed how intermediaries adjust prices by tracking various consumer behaviors. This can include the type of product, mouse movements, and unpurchased items left in shopping carts.1
This ongoing study underscores the potential widespread, data-driven pricing practices used to reshape how products are sold and how much consumers pay for them.
How Consumers Are Affected by Surveillance Pricing
Instead of having fixed prices for products, surveillance pricing allows retailers to adjust the price or promotion of a product based on individual data and consumer behaviors. If the data suggests that the consumer is willing to pay more, the price will be higher.
“Surveillance pricing means consumers lose the ability to compare prices accurately because what they see may be tailored to their behavior, location, income level, or even browsing history. Should someone be charged a higher price just because they live in a certain zip code, or because they made a bad online purchase last year? Thanks to surveillance pricing, that’s the world we’re living in,” said Michael Mezzatesta, economics and climate educator, and founder of Better Future Media.
Who’s Paying the Price?
About 273 million Americans, or 80.4%, now shop online, according to a survey by Capital One. Collectively, they spent about $1.36 trillion online in 2024.2
“Since surveillance pricing happens mostly online, most people will have no idea they’re being shown different prices based on hidden algorithms, making it nearly impossible to make informed purchasing decisions. In the worst cases, this practice erodes trust in markets, where fairness should be a given, not a privilege reserved for those with the best data protection habits,” Mezzatesta said.
How to Protect Yourself
Consumers can not easily recognize when they are victims of surveillance pricing because it’s designed to be invisible. But there are clues to be seen by those who are wary.
“There are clues consumers can use to tell when surveillance pricing might be at play. For example, if consumers notice fluctuating prices after repeated visits to a site, or different prices across different devices–or their peers are seeing different prices–those are all signs they are likely experiencing surveillance pricing influenced by personal or device data,” said Mezzatesta.
Proactive Steps to Take
To protect themselves from surveillance, consumers can take several proactive steps to safeguard their personal information and ensure fair pricing.
Use a VPN: A virtual private network, or VPN, masks your location and browsing activity to prevent targeted pricing. There are free VPNs while a subscription service costs about $10 per month.3
Clear Browser Cookies Regularly: Clearing the cookies from your device regularly limits the ability to track your online behavior because the data has been deleted.
Browse in Incognito Mode: Your browsing history and personal data aren’t saved when browsing in Incognito mode.
Compare Prices Across Devices: Check prices on different devices to spot potential price differences.
“The bigger issue is that individuals shouldn’t have to outsmart an opaque system just to get fair treatment and transparent pricing. This is where regulation needs to step in,” Mezzatesta said.
Current regulations, such as the FTC Act and the California Consumer Privacy ACT (CCPA), aim to protect consumers by promoting transparency and control over personal data.45 However, these laws do not fully address surveillance pricing, leaving gaps in consumer protection.
Is This Price-Fixing?
The FTC defines price fixing as “an agreement (written, verbal, or inferred from conduct) among competitors to raise, lower, maintain, or stabilize prices or price levels.”6 Basically, companies can’t set prices or terms after setting up an agreement with their competition because consumers expect the basic laws of supply and demand to apply. But then the question becomes, is surveillance pricing “price fixing”?
“The simplest solution is to make algorithmic price fixing illegal. And there is a legal precedent for this: Under US antitrust laws, price fixing due to corporate collusion is illegal.7 The issue is that the development of automated price-setting algorithms has created loopholes in existing law,” Mezzatesta said.
Mezzatesta asserts that corporations will need new rules regarding collecting and using personal data because of the rise of big data algorithms. He claims that’s how we ensure the algorithms don’t discriminate against specific sets of consumers.
“Additionally, enforcement mechanisms should be in place to prevent predatory pricing that exploits consumer data to extract maximum profit from the public. At a minimum, companies should be required to disclose when prices are being personalized, and on what basis.”89
The Bottom Line
Online shopping offers unmatched convenience, making it a preferred choice for many consumers. However, shoppers want to feel comfortable purchasing online without worrying about unfair pricing.
Unless stronger consumer protections are passed into law, you will need to stay vigilant and take steps to ensure your data is not exploited.
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A flyer I made to train folks locally:
Info Security – Digital Exhaust Management - Cleaners:
Periodically, throughout the day, when you remove an amount of cookies, trackers, bots, packet sniffers, key loggers, image/file grabber, temporary files, etc., code from your devices, how much code are you removing?
Exercise: Download the free version of CleanMaster on your device. Run it for the first time and see how many MBs of code is removed. From that moment forward, continually remove all 3rd party surveillance code from your devices on a regular basis according to how you use them. If you search the web, clean up afterwards. When you are done for the day, clean up. If you are working on anything sensitive, be sure to run a “Clean – Restart – Clean” sequence on your device at the beginning and at the end.
Definition:
~ or ≈ Means “approximately” or “approximately equal to”
Key Assumptions:
• 1 MB = 1,048,576 bytes (binary mebibyte, commonly used) or 1,000,000 bytes (decimal megabyte).
• 1,048,576 bytes ≈ 1,048,576 characters
• A useful rule of thumb: assume ~600–700 pages per MB for typical manuscript-style pages (~1,500–1,700 characters/page).
Character Conversion Info:
One megabyte (1 MB) of plain text will hold roughly between 200 and 1,000 pages, depending on assumptions about characters per page and encoding.
Using decimal 1,000,000 bytes gives slightly smaller numbers (e.g., 1,000 chars/page → 1,000 pages).
Practical examples
• Plain-text novel (average ~1,500 chars/page): ~650–700 pages per MB.
• Email-sized messages (~500–1,000 chars/page): 1,000–2,000 pages per MB.
• PDF or DOCX files include formatting and compression; one MB of a formatted document might contain far fewer visible pages (often 1–50 pages) depending on images, fonts, and internal compression.
* * *
Device Cleaning Programs vs Optimization Programs
There are many software programs you can purchase to clean the junk off your PC and “optimize it.” Do not use them unless they are built to allow you to only clean the junk files, cookies, trackers, etc. You do not want is the optimization part. These programs will changing the core coding that runs your device. In a PC, this coding is called The Registry Keys. I tried a “Microsoft Approved” PC optimizer once. My PC was much faster… so I optimized my PC about once a week for 3-4 months. And then programs started to act weird and do things they were not supposed to do. In the end, I had to re-format the hard drive and start over.
So far, I have only found two Cleaning programs that focus on cleaning first and optimizing is an optional second: Clean Master and CCleaner. Both are decent. CCleaner was great until 11/2025 when it reformatted it’s user interface to remove our choices (googlized like Firefox and so many other good programs). I switched to Clean Master, which is just OK. I would like to upgrade it, but the USA payment interface is the evil digital financial transaction control grid Paypal that I will not use.
Tip: Never allow yourself to be called an “End User.” You are a “Customer.” You paid good money for the product and you have a relationship with the company because of that. They owe you service and a quality product. Do not ever let a corporation turn you into a powerless “End User.”