Why You Pay More Than Everyone Else for the Same Thing

You search for a product, see a price, and assume it is the price. It is not. The number on your screen may have been calculated specifically for you — and someone else may be paying less for the identical item right now.

What surveillance pricing actually means

The polite industry term is personalized pricing. Critics call it surveillance pricing, and that name is more honest. It describes the practice of collecting personal information about a shopper and using it to charge different prices to different people for the same goods or services.

This is not the old story of prices rising during a holiday rush. That is dynamic pricing, where the price moves with supply and demand and everyone sees the same jump. Surveillance pricing goes a step further. It targets you specifically, based on what a company believes you are willing to pay.

In July 2024, the Federal Trade Commission ordered eight companies that build these pricing tools to hand over information about how they work. In January 2025, the agency released its preliminary findings — and they confirmed that this is not a hypothetical concern.

The data they use to price you

Here is what makes surveillance pricing different from anything that came before: the sheer granularity of the data feeding the price.

According to the FTC's findings, the inputs can include your precise location, your demographics, and your browsing history. But it gets more intimate than that. The study found that companies can track behaviors as small as the movements of your mouse on a webpage and the products you leave unpurchased in your shopping cart.

Two people looking at the same product at the same moment can be shown two different prices — and neither one knows the other number exists.

Think about what that means. Hesitating over a purchase, abandoning a cart, returning to a page repeatedly — these are signals. An algorithm reads them as evidence of how badly you want something, and adjusts accordingly. The goal is to estimate your "willingness to pay" and capture as much of it as possible.

The companies quietly building it

This is not the work of a few shady websites. The FTC's review was based on documents from established firms — among them Mastercard, Accenture, PROS, Bloomreach, Revionics, and McKinsey & Co.

These are intermediaries. They do not sell to you directly. They build the pricing engines that ordinary retailers plug in behind the scenes. And the FTC found those intermediaries worked with at least 250 retail clients, ranging from grocery stores to clothing sellers.

That detail matters. It means surveillance pricing is not confined to airline tickets or luxury goods. The infrastructure to price you individually is being wired into the everyday places you shop for food and clothes — the purchases you make without a second thought.

Why this feels wrong to almost everyone

There is a reason this practice tends to stay quiet. When people learn how it works, they do not like it.

A May 2024 survey found that 66% of Americans opposed online retailers selling the same goods and services at different prices based on a buyer's personal information. That is a rare level of agreement on any economic question.

The discomfort is intuitive. A marketplace is supposed to run on a shared, visible price — the number everyone can see and respond to. Surveillance pricing breaks that. It replaces one public price with millions of private ones, each calculated to extract the maximum a specific person will tolerate. You are no longer shopping in a market. You are being individually negotiated against by a system that knows far more about you than you know about it.

How to push back

You cannot opt out of being measured entirely, but you can make yourself harder to read. A few practical steps reduce the data working against you:

• Shop in a private or incognito window so your browsing history and cookies are not feeding the price.
• Compare the same item across devices and networks — a phone on cellular data can show a different number than a laptop at home.
• Log out before browsing. An anonymous shopper is harder to profile than a logged-in one.
• Walk away and check back later. Sometimes the abandoned-cart signal you leave behind triggers a lower price, not a higher one.

None of these is a cure. The deeper fix is regulatory, and that fight is still underway. But awareness is the first defense. The moment you stop assuming the price you see is the price everyone sees, you start shopping with your eyes open.

The discipline

The price on your screen is a claim about you, not a fact about the product. Treat it that way. Slow down, compare, strip away the data trail you leave behind, and never assume you are getting the same deal as the person next to you. In a system built to read your willingness to pay, the disciplined move is to give it as little to read as possible.