San Francisco: Don’t Fall for Industry Defense of Surveillance Pricing
The Electronic Frontier Foundation is backing California Assembly Bill 2654, authored by Assemblymember Chris Ward, which would ban surveillance pricing — the practice of charging different people different prices for the same product based on personal data companies have collected about them.
Why this matters: You could be paying more for something right now simply because a company knows enough about you to charge it. Same product, different price, based on data you never agreed to hand over for that purpose. This is what happens when mass data collection meets retail. It is not a technical side effect — it is the business model working as intended. A.B. 2654 tries to draw a line. The industry will argue the practice is just personalization. It is not. It is using your own information against your wallet.
Who should care: Privacy officers · Cybersecurity · General readers · Policy
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