Did you know the data that big tech, websites and apps harvest from you can be used to manipulate the prices you see online? If they can personalise ads, then they can personalise pricing. Since most people never truly consent to this harvesting, the practice is more accurately called surveillance pricing. It is yet another reason why Rebel Tech Alliance tries to help you avoid the surveillance economy - by using ethical tech that doesn't track you.

In this article we investigate the practice of surveillance pricing: what it is, where it is used and how widespread it is.

TL;DR

We found that surveillance pricing is being used more and more as time goes by, as AI-powered pricing consultancies emerge to empower it. If we continue to give away our data we create an information disparity, where companies know a lot more about us than we do about them. And since the surveillance economy has become so mainstream, companies cannot resist the temptation to start using our personal data to charge us more. You can stop this by taking the kind of precautions we outline in the Big Tech Walkout programme - start today, and never pay unfair prices online again!

Dynamic pricing vs Surveillance pricing

This year Delta Airlines admitted using AI to set ticket prices and there was negative customer reaction, but is that dynamic pricing or surveillance pricing? What's the difference? Dynamic pricing deploys data analytics and AI to analyse market conditions - e.g. competitor prices, weather forecasts, inventory levels - to predict optimal pricing. This has been going on for the last 20 years and is considered normal. Delta say they do not use personal data, i.e. they are not using 'personalised pricing', but do we believe them? Given that they are using Fetcherr, an Israeli AI pricing start-up, I am sceptical. Fetcherr say on their site that they do not use personal information for the pricing so perhaps the Gaza genocide, and the fact that Israel is home to some of the world's top surveillance software companies like NSO Group, has made me a bit jaded.

Dynamic pricing with airline tickets has been happening for years, and AI is taking it to new levels by incorporating the personal data aspect:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/advisor/2024/12/09/are-airlines-spying-on-you-the-hidden-costs-of-surveillance-pricing-and-how-to-avoid-them/

“AI algorithms .... enable real-time market adjustments and personalised pricing by utilising browsing history, purchase behaviour, and loyalty status. For example, AI models like PROS Willingness-to-Pay (WTP) predict the maximum price a customer is willing to pay, optimising revenue management.”

e.g:

• Repeatedly searching for the same flight can cause prices to spike, as the algorithm interprets it as urgency to book
• If you live in a high-income ZIP code, you might get hit with higher fares since the algorithm assumes you can afford it
• Researching luxury hotels could prompt pricier travel package offers tailored to premium preferences

Be aware that the tactics recommended in that Forbes article are not backed up by hard evidence. E.g. it's not clear that just using incognito windows, or a VPN, will actually prevent airlines from charging you higher prices. But that doesn't mean they won't try.

Use ethical tech that really does stop online data leakage in the entirety of your online life (not just when buying airline tickets) - such as a hardened browser coupled with a good VPN, AND not using Google or Meta products, AND only inputting minimal personal data into other websites when purchasing - this WILL reduce surveillance pricing indirectly, by not releasing your data in the first place.

The enablers - pricing software and consultancies

It is companies like Sciative, Plexure and PROS that are offering companies the ability to implement surveillance pricing. On Sciative's website they say (emphasis added by me):

"Personalized pricing is the practice of offering customized prices to individual travelers based on factors such as their past behavior, preferences, loyalty status, and even their overall value to the airline."

It's possible that the 'past behaviour, preferences' part is confined to just first party data that the airline holds on you based on past transactions, but everything we know about how the surveillance economy has crept up in scope over the last 20 years suggests that they would not stop there. They would extend that to mean your browsing behaviour and anything else they can get from data brokers.

The very presence of companies like Sciative, offering what is essentially data analytics software, means that entire industries (they also work with retail and hospitality) can become like Google and Meta - selling you products based on persistent behaviour profiles they hold on you. And the fact that PROS just sold for $1.4 Billion should tell you something about how sought-after this data mining is.

Do companies hold 'customer profiles'?

Holding generalised customer profiles (customer groups) is common in retail, but as time goes by the ability to hold individual customer profiles is being enabled for smaller retailers. They can move into the world of 'big data', as boasted by this retail consultant/software vendor that uses AI: Coniq. They state that:

"Customer profiles allow for targeted advertising campaigns, tailored messaging, and personalized product recommendations, ensuring each shopper feels valued and understood."

As with the rest of the surveillance economy this is one-sided and clearly unfair. It is not transparent and a data privacy nightmare - you will not be aware your information is being surveilled.

Surveillance pricing - in detail

This August 2025 Harvard Review interview with mathematician, Noah Giansiracusa, discusses the rise of surveillance pricing:
https://hls.harvard.edu/today/how-delta-airlines-and-other-companies-use-dynamic-pricing-to-determine-how-much-you-pay/
The gist is that in the last 10 years it as become more widespread as the public has become desensitised to it. In common with the rest of the surveillance economy, they've been boiling the frog gradually. You didn't notice the water getting too hot. Here's a quote from Giansiracusa:

"There is much more of what economists call “information inequality” today. In the old days, I could visit the market, they can look at me, size me up, and use broad indicators to determine the price I will pay for something. I could size them up too — do they seem trustworthy? We don’t know anything about each other than whatever prejudices we have by looking at each other. But now imagine I go to that same market, and they look at me and they know every video I’ve watched on YouTube, everything I’ve searched in Google, and everything I have liked on Facebook, every conversation I’ve had with an AI chatbot. Does that feel like a fair situation? It’s that level of information inequality that’s a genuinely new thing."

FTC investigation

Perhaps (for once!) a government will step in to protect us? In 2024 the FTC began investigating Mastercard, Revionics, Bloomreach, JPMorgan Chase, Task Software, PROS, Accenture and McKinsey & Co because all of them offer 'products' to enable surveillance pricing. This was while Lina Khan was chair of the FTC. She is awesome, and really took on the big tech monopolies using Anti-Trust legislation. Of course Trump fired her as soon as he was sworn in, but a silver lining is that she is now helping Zoran Mamdani's transition team.

Early in 2025 they published their preliminary findings: they found that personal data is used to 'optimise pricing' (meaning rinse you for cash and maximise profit for the company).

"For example, sports betting websites can track a hesitant user’s actions and trigger prompts to encourage engagement. Businesses can also adjust offers based on factors like a consumer’s perceived price sensitivity or specific needs, such as promoting stress-relief products to homeowners in a flood zone. This enables companies to dynamically customize their pricing and marketing to maximize consumer engagement."

They found that

"the intermediaries serve a wide range of clients across diverse industries, which include consumer-facing businesses, such as grocery stores, apparel retailers, and health and beauty stores. Many clients operate both online and in brick-and-mortar stores. Additionally, some intermediaries sell to other businesses, which include distributors and wholesalers."

This Aljazeera article reports on the FTC study and gives wider context. They state that

"Retailers are using AI to gather detailed information about consumers, including login data, location, browsing behaviour, “abandoned cart items”, and even mouse movement patterns, and then feeding this information into pricing algorithms."

Insurance

They also mention that the UK insurance company Aviva used to have a 'Pay as you drive' insurance policy, where your driving was tracked by satellite, but it was scrapped for being too creepy. This lives on these days with the 'black box' that insurers provide to new drivers. The box records data about how you drive so "the better you drive, the less you pay".

You can see how all this could be further misused as predatory insurance pricing, or for example in the same way baby products ads are served for a long time after a hospital visit that results in a miscarriage, or legal help to disaster zone residents.

Does the FTC investigation mean that surveillance pricing will be regulated out of existence? Probably not, since the findings were published just as Trump took office in January 2025. There is little chance he will act on them, given his desire to nerf the FTC.

However there is hope in the US that more states will follow New York in passing laws to ban 'agorithmic pricing' (Dec 2025).

It's not new, it's just more widespread now

In 2015 Propublica found that The Princeton Review’s online SAT tutoring packages were charging more by zip code, targeting areas with higher concentrations of Asian parents. Price gouging 'tiger mums' is pretty unsavoury, but it's become much more widespread and sophisticated since then.

The author of this article attended a conference in 2018 that boasted that 'personalised pricing' was about to be the big thing. Companies, beyond a few creepy experiments described in the article, were not ready (or allowed) to deploy surveillance pricing back then. But now in 2025, with the help of the growing number of AI pricing consultancies (like those described above), they are itching to start using it in earnest.

Of course anyone shopping on Amazon knows (I hope!) that they are in a captive, closed market, and surveillance pricing is just how things are done there. I don't shop there any more - for this reason - but I do remember the progression from 'oh that's a nice helpful recommendation!' to 'wait, what's all this crap I'm being recommended' to 'hang on, it's Black Friday and these prices are actually higher!'.

Algorithmic wage discrimination in the gig economy

Cory Doctorow outlined the Enshittification process, and reminds us in this article that price gouging, fraud and wage theft are actually built into it. He describes it as a shell game, with big tech tweaking things in the background to their advantage:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/12/algorithmic-wage-discrimination/#fishers-of-men

If you broaden the definition of surveillance pricing to include wages, then you see that entire groups of workers are subject to this every day. He quotes this study and this video which show how two different drivers can be paid very different amounts for the same trip when they work for Uber or similar gig-work companies. So it's not just surge pricing. It's creepier and more unfair than that. It's similar for Amazon warehouse workers who are relentlessly tracked and herded.

Doctorow also covers surveillance pricing - along with adjacent topics - in this and this article. The latter is from June 2025 and frames surveillance pricing like this:

"when a company sells you something for $2 that someone else can buy for $1, they're revaluing the dollars in your pocket at half the rate of the other guy's."

He mentions Plexure (which is part-owned by McDonalds) that:

"offers drive-through restaurants the ability to raise the price of your regular order based on whether you've recently received your paycheck."

and describes surveillance pricing as the "pricing revolution that is underway in the US and the world today". This tracks with what we've described in this article - pricing software and consultancy companies have been building up their capabilities over the last decade, and AI has enabled them to finally launch products that bring surveillance pricing to all companies.

Smart devices

An area that people forget is a huge behavioural data leak is smart devices. The devices, such as Google's Nest Home and Amazon Alexa are usually inexpensive and yet the global market for such devices was valued at $128 Billion in 2024. So Shoshana Zuboff wasn't far off when she stated in her book, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, that while valued at $36 Billion in 2018, it was predicted to be worth $151 Billion by 2023. By owning a smart device you are placing a big tech sensor in your house to learn your behaviour. Drip, drip, drip you are tipping the information balance - they know a LOT about you; you know almost nothing about them. Our advice is to chuck all those devices out, you don't need them.

Instacart (a recent example - December 2025)

A more recent example of surveillance pricing was brought to my attention by Cory Doctorow in this article https://pluralistic.net/2025/12/11/nothing-personal/ and also reported here.

Three organisations teamed up to test purchases via Instacart, making the same purchases at the same time from different locations from the same stores. Surveillance pricing was found on purchases from Albertsons, Costco, Kroger, and Sprouts Farmers Market.

"The price-swings are wild. Some test subjects are being charged 23% more than others. The average variance for "the exact same items, from the exact same locations, at the exact same time" comes out to 7%, or "$1,200 per year for groceries" for a family of four."

How can you avoid surveillance pricing?

Short answer: by avoiding surveillance. Don't feed the beast, and it will not grow stronger. Stop leaking data by taking the precautions and using the ethical tech suggested in

Cory Doctorow, in this article, makes a good point about all of big tech's problems 'being about the surveillance part':

"And some people are angry because surveillance feeds surveillance pricing. The thing is, whatever else all these people are angry about, they're all angry about surveillance. Are you angry that ad-tech is stealing a 51% share of news revenue? You're actually angry about surveillance. Are you angry that "AI" is being used to automatically reject resumes on racial, age or gender grounds? You're actually angry about surveillance."

So be aware that the most difference you can make for protecting yourself from surveillance pricing is to continually protect yourself from surveillance itself. These are some standard online habits that achieve this (and are included in the Big Tech Walkout):

• Use a hardened browser to prevent data leakage as you browse - choose from our list of vetted options
• Use different browsers for different searches. Despite 'fingerprinting' being increasingly used to track you, you can still get great benefits from using 'the right tool for the job', and not the same browser all the time. For example I only use the Duck Duck Go browser for watching YouTube videos (their Duck Player strips away the tracking)
• Use a good VPN: These will change your IP address and bundle it in with any others using that VPN server. Good ones like Mullvad also let you use their DNS servers at the same time so you can filter out tracking and ads.
• Don't use Google search: Ever. They track you and keep a permanent profile on you - and as described in this article, smaller companies are starting to do this too. Use a search engine from our list instead. The browsers we recommend will let you switch between these engines on the fly so you can introduce even more variety to your internet searches.
• Only input the minimum data necessary when shopping online. Use masked email addresses from a privacy-focused email provider, and use temporary credit card numbers if your bank, e.g. Monzo, supports that feature.
• Create a white-list and clear cookies regularly: Or even better - whenever you close your browser. The whitelist will keep you signed in to sites for convenience, and clearing the rest will ditch the unnecessary tracking cookies from other sites.
• Ditch the data-hungry apps on your phone: Check them at https://reports.exodus-privacy.eu.org/en/ and uninstall those that have Google, Facebook and other trackers in them. Use a web browser instead and put them on your whitelist if needed. If you have an iPhone toggle the setting to turn off all app tracking. On Android, you can install the DuckDuckGo browser and use their app tracking protection setting in the background.
• Don't use any Meta products. Or Google products. Their entire business model relies on tracking you. So. Don't. Let. Them.

Conclusion

As we have researched surveillance pricing we have found that it is in fact an emerging industry. 25 years of the public allowing big tech to harvest vast amounts of their behavioural data every day has now emboldened AI start-ups to offer surveillance pricing products.

Our conclusion is that yes, it is happening now, but that it is about to get much worse as companies of all sizes adopt the pricing products from pricing software companies we've mentioned in this article.

So the message is clear:

If you don't particularly care about the privacy of your online data you are going to be ripped off by companies online. It will cost you real money. It will be one of the true costs of the era of 'free' that we've lived through in the last 25 years.

Or, as Shoshana Zuboff put it in her book, The Age Of Surveillance Capitalism:

"Whether it’s a “smart” home device, what the insurance companies call “behavioral underwriting,” or any one of thousands of other transactions, we now pay for our own domination."

Sources

Other than articles linked above, I also drew info from this short NPR podcast about surveillance pricing (Sep 25):
https://www.npr.org/2025/09/23/nx-s1-5550264/should-surveillance-pricing-be-banned

And from the book The Age Of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff.

Rebel Tech Alliance is a non-profit dedicated to getting as many people off big tech products as possible. Why? Because that reduces the surveillance economy, and reducing that is good for individuals and society.