Every car buyer has met that one salesman who takes a single look at your exhausted, sleep-deprived face and decides you'll happily pay two thousand dollars over sticker. Congress just discovered AI has learned that exact trick and is now running it on basically everyone, all the time, through your phone instead of your face.
The technical term is surveillance pricing, and it's what happens when a company uses your personal data, location, browsing history, loyalty program activity, how badly you seem to want something right now, to quietly charge you a different price than the person standing next to you for the exact same item. Senator Josh Hawley, chairing a Senate Judiciary subcommittee hearing on the subject, put it in a sentence that needs no translation: "Big tech has reinvented the ripoff." He cited a report claiming Lyft charged 55 different riders in his home state of Missouri 29 different prices for the identical route at the identical time. One Kroger customer, according to testimony, requested their own shopping profile and received sixty-two pages back.
Here's the part that makes it genuinely new rather than just old-fashioned haggling: for over a century, the entire point of a price tag was that everyone paid the same number. Surveillance pricing quietly undoes that, using AI to estimate the maximum a specific person might tolerate paying, then charging exactly that, in real time, without anyone standing at a register sizing you up on purpose.
Four states have already banned some version of this, Maryland, Connecticut, New York, and New Jersey, with New Jersey's law letting individual shoppers sue directly and collect triple damages for willful violations. Hawley says federal legislation is coming. The grocery industry's trade group, unsurprisingly, pushed back, insisting loyalty programs exist to help people save money, not pay more, and that food prices depend on far more than anyone's personal browsing habits.
The used-car salesman version of this at least had the decency to make eye contact while doing it.
Sources: Gizmodo — During a Day of Rancor, Senators Find Common Ground: No One Likes Surveillance Pricing (https://gizmodo.com/during-a-day-of-rancor-senators-find-common-ground-no-one-likes-surveillance-pricing-2000794639); TechTimes — Senate Holds First AI Pricing Hearing: Agentic Shopping Assistants Expose Legal Blind Spot (https://www.techtimes.com/articles/323262/20260806/senate-holds-first-ai-pricing-hearing-agentic-shopping-assistants-expose-legal-blind-spot.htm)