The more companies know about you, the more you can be exploited.
Your data profile is constantly being updated when you browse, shop online, or use your credit card. Websites and apps track your location, device, searches, purchases, shopping carts, mouse movements, and how long you look at a product.
Your data profile includes information from brokers, loyalty programs, credit records, advertising networks, and other platforms. AI groups you by estimating income, interests, and vulnerabilities.
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) began investigating in 2024, issuing demands for information to eight companies offering surveillance pricing products: Mastercard, Revionics, Bloomreach, JPMorgan Chase, Task Software, PROS, Accenture, and McKinsey & Company.
In January 2025, the FTC released preliminary findings showing a “hidden ecosystem of data brokers, digital platforms, and other intermediaries that specialize in monitoring and selling user data.”
The findings showed companies had access to extraordinarily detailed information. The FTC found a hidden ecosystem with at least 250 clients “that sell goods or services ranging from grocery stores to apparel retailers.”
Price manipulation is usually not obvious and can be quite sophisticated. Companies can withhold a discount, place expensive products at the top of your search results, or show a financially desperate customer a convenient yet costly financing option.
Investigations Show How Deep This Goes
The Princeton Review was caught charging between $6,600 and $8,400 for the same tutoring package based on customers’ ZIP codes. Asian residents were 1.8 times more likely to receive the higher price, including those in lower-income neighborhoods.
The company conveniently claimed it was based on business conditions. Maybe, but this demonstrates how personalized pricing can mimic discriminatory targeting.
Then we have Instacart “experimenting” with price differences on groceries. A Consumer Reports investigation involving more than 400 shoppers found identical grocery items were offered at different prices to different customers shopping at the same stores at the same time. Nearly three-quarters of the products tested showed price variations of as much as 23 percent.
The behavior isn’t just in the United States. The European Commission found deceptive practices by SHEIN, Apple, Temu, Vinted, Viagogo, Tinder, PayPal, Shopify, Amazon Prime, and more. Practices ranged from fake discounts (i.e., pretending to offer better deals by showing price reductions that are not based on the actual “prior prices”) to pressure selling (i.e., putting consumers under pressure to complete purchases using tactics like false purchase deadlines).
Paired with your personal data, these practices could be highly effective at getting you to pay more.
Your Data Is a Gold Mine
Economist Benjamin Shiller found that personalized pricing based on just browsing history increased profits by 12.99 percent, compared to 0.25 percent for demographic information alone. A whopping 52-fold increase.
It’s lucrative for financial predators too. Data brokers classify people using labels such as “Financially Challenged,” “Rural and Barely Making It,” “Retiring on Empty,” “Credit Crunched,” and “Paycheck to Paycheck Consumers.” Federal regulators warn that these classifications can be sold to companies offering financially exploitative products to target the most vulnerable members of society.
A consumer searching for eviction assistance, payday loans, overdue utility help, or emergency medical care shows financial or emotional vulnerabilities that can be exploited. The more urgent and desperate you appear, the more vulnerable you are.
Someone repeatedly searching for “emergency plumber near me” at 2 a.m., a person searching for last-minute airfare following a family emergency, or a parent comparing baby thermometers at midnight is communicating an immediate need and a likely willingness to pay more.
Exploitation Can Be Automated and Hidden
Two people could visit the same website at the same time and see different prices, products, discounts, or financing offers. You can’t know price tailoring has occurred unless you compare prices with others.
It’s especially easy to exploit older adults or discriminate without explicitly entering age, race, sex, religion, disability, or income as variables that alter the price. Your ZIP code, location history, device type, shopping patterns, and online behavior give it away.
AI does not literally need a field marked “race,” “age,” or “disability.” It can predict those attributes.
Surveillance pricing could even punish you for being responsible. Looking diligently for the best price might signal to the algorithm that you spend wisely, but it could also tell the AI that the purchase is inevitable. Researching cancer treatment, elder care, addiction services, or legal assistance could be a vulnerability.
Researching the help you really need could make that help more expensive.
Demand Transparency
Algorithms could give lower prices to struggling families, reward loyal customers, or direct meaningful discounts to people who genuinely need them. This would be nice, but none of the investigations cited here found companies using the technology to help consumers. Instead, it was being used purely to increase profits.
Companies should disclose when personal data or AI shapes an offer, show the standard price, and identify what information influenced the difference. But we should not wait for government regulators: entrepreneurs should build watchdog apps that expose AI pricing manipulations.
Companies watch us. We deserve tools to watch them back and make exploitation costly.
When a company knows that you are desperate, your desperation should never become a liability it can exploit.
Sarah Westall, host of Business Game Changers, is a force in media, business, and technology, renowned for fearless investigative journalism and sharp insights into global affairs. She is a former engineer, computer scientist, and business professor at the Carlson School of Business.