“Your Data, Their Profit: The Consumer Cost of AI Surveillance Pricing”

Opening Statement of

Dr. Lindsay Owens, Ph.D.

President and CEO, Groundwork Collaborative

“Your Data, Their Profit: The Consumer Cost of AI Surveillance Pricing”

Crime and Counterterrorism Subcommittee of the Senate Judiciary Committee

August 4, 2026

(as prepared for delivery)

Chairman Hawley, Ranking Member Durbin, and Members of the Subcommittee,

Thank you for the opportunity to testify. I’m here today to discuss a hidden practice that is coming for every line in the household budget, from groceries and gas to concert tickets and airfares. It’s called surveillance pricing, and it’s what happens when corporations charge people different prices for the same item based on their personal information. It’s also a subject in my forthcoming book Gouged: The End of a Fair Price – and What That Means for Your Wallet.

With surveillance pricing, Big Tech has reinvented the ripoff. Personalized pricing is not new. Sellers used to haggle with customers, sizing them up to decide how much they could charge. That changed with the invention of the price tag in the late 19th century. Since then, American consumers have operated under a basic assumption: that every customer would be charged the same price for the same item.

Prices were historically set by what is known as the ‘cost-plus’ model: a company takes the cost of producing a good and adds a reasonable profit margin on top. But more recently, executives and consultants pushed firms in a different direction, urging companies to capture the full extent of what customers are willing to pay.

Today, companies deploy a dizzying array of tactics designed to extract maximum profit from each transaction. They tack on hidden fees, collude on price hikes with their competitors, and deploy AI-powered pricing experiments on unsuspecting shoppers.

This new squeeze on your wallet is made possible by both corporate consolidation and technological advances. After all, it’s hard to overcharge a customer who can walk across the street for a better deal. And new capabilities, including the rise of AI, have turned pricing into a highly engineered science.

The most powerful weapon in this new pricing arsenal is surveillance pricing. Companies can now purchase, track, and analyze your personal data at a previously unimaginable scale. They catalog your location, your purchase history, and even your cursor movements to better predict exactly how much they can charge you. Even nominally beneficial programs, like loyalty rewards, can be used to harvest your information, turning customers into guinea pigs in sophisticated pricing experiments.

Imagine you’re the parent of a sick child. It’s midnight. You ask Walmart’s AI shopping assistant Sparky to suggest a thermometer and some Tylenol. Sparky knows that your purchase is urgent, potentially leveraging that vulnerability to overcharge you. As agentic commerce reshapes how we shop online, with AI agents gaining access to your habits, purchases, and personal  conversations, the risk of being ripped off will only grow.

This isn’t just hypothetical. Target’s app hikes the price when it knows you’re in the store. DoorDash has developed technology that tailors recommendations based on how hungry it thinks you are. Travel sites like Expedia have charged users from high-cost cities more for identical hotel rooms. And Kroger’s loyalty program uses your data to predict how much money you make. A 2025 Federal Trade Commission report confirms that companies are already deploying surveillance pricing in major industries.

But surveillance pricing isn’t just unfair. It erodes transparency and predictability and makes it harder for families to budget, let alone comparison shop. As we do more of our shopping online and on our phones, we have no idea if we’re being charged a different price than our neighbor.

I’m often asked what consumers can do to protect themselves. Uncovering surveillance pricing   requires comparing prices across users, devices, and locations all at once. This is a hard task for veteran researchers and a nearly impossible one for ordinary consumers.

The answer can’t be to teach everyone how to beat the machine. We must set rules of the road so the machine plays fair. Clear and transparent prices are essential for a functioning capitalist economy.

The good news is, momentum is on the side of shoppers. This year alone, more than 40 bills in 24 states and cities, red and blue alike, have been introduced or passed to curtail surveillance pricing. More than three-fourths of Americans support banning the practice entirely.

It’s not too late to preserve fair pricing in America. We can start by pricing products again, rather than people.

Thank you. I look forward to your questions.