Bill > HB1942

Introduced Session

Providing for prohibition on surveillance pricing; and imposing penalties. The General Assembly finds and declares as follows: (1) A recent study documented how businesses are aggressively and secretly engaging in surveillance of their customers and secretly varying prices between customers or groups accordingly. The study documented the following surveillance-based pricing practices: (i) Orbitz learned that Mac users typically spend more money to stay at hotels and steered those users toward different, sometimes costlier, travel options than non-Mac users. (ii) Hotel booking sites charged people in certain zip codes more money to stay at hotels than people in other zip codes across the country. In one example, a person in the Bay area was charged by Hotels.com $80 more to stay in a New York City hotel than someone browsing for the same room from Kansas City. (iii) Staples.com charged people more for the same stapler if they knew a person had fewer options such as not being physically near a competitor. (iv) Target charged people more for its products when they were in a Target parking lot versus when they were in another location because the company determined people who were near a store entrance were willing to pay more. As a result, prices spiked for a television, a smart watch, a vacuum and a child car seat once consumers had arrived in a store parking lot. (v) Test preparation company The Princeton Review charged customers more money when it found that they lived in zip codes with large Asian populations. (2) Corporate consultants have told clients that surveillance-based pricing strategies "have become a cornerstone of modern business strategy." Profit margins are improved by two to seven percentage points when surveillance pricing is implemented, according to McKinsey and Company. A Yale study found surveillance-based pricing increased profits for airlines by 4% to 5%. (3) Other studies document that surveillance pricing impacts lower-income people the most. A study of broadband Internet offers to 1,100,000 residential addresses showed the worst deals given to the poorest people. Areas with discounted prices tended to have a higher average income than areas that tended to see higher prices. (4) Personalized or surveillance-based pricing technologies could permit large grocery store chains to impose unfair and discriminatory prices on their customers for basic food necessities in ways that might increase the economic burdens of those already subject to discrimination or economic hardships. (5) Recent reports have raised the possibility that publicly traded grocery store chains, including the dozens of grocery brands under Kroger's corporate umbrella, are concurrently installing facial recognition and other biometric technologies and adopting electronic shelving labels. Together, these technologies could allow grocery retailers to distinguish between customers based on race, gender, disability, distance traveled to the store, age and electronically stored personal information in real time and price food differently based on individualized profiling. (6) Legislation is required to fairly and compassionately restrain the deployment and use of unfair, discriminatory, privacy-invading technologies that, if deployed in ways contrary to the public interest and welfare, will dramatically exacerbate gaps between wealthy and working families to the unneeded benefit of the former and the enduring, unjust harm of the latter.

AI Summary

Committee Categories

Danilo Burgos (D)*,  Lisa Borowski (D),  Johanny Cepeda-Freytiz (D),  Joe Ciresi (D),  Elizabeth Fiedler (D),  Pat Gallagher (D),  Roni Green (D),  Manny Guzman (D),  Jim Haddock (D),  Carol Hill-Evans (D),  Joe Hohenstein (D),  Tarik Khan (D),  Emily Kinkead (D),  Bob Merski (D),  James Prokopiak (D),  Nikki Rivera (D),  Ben Sanchez (D),  Izzy Smith-Wade-El (D),  Mandy Steele (D), 

Consumer Protection, Technology & Utilities (h) Hearing (09:30:00 1/27/2026 Room G50 Irvis Office) (on 01/27/2026)

Official Document