Congressman Gregorio “Greg” Casar, a Democrat from Texas, recently announced that he wants to work towards banning surveillance pricing at a federal level. To do so, he introduced the Stop AI (artificial intelligence) Price Gouging and Wage Fixing Act of 2025 to Congress on July 23. But what exactly is surveillance pricing, and how does this potential ban affect you and your shopping habits? We investigate all of that and more below. 

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What is surveillance pricing? 

Surveillance pricing—or dynamic pricing or personalized pricing—is when a company uses technology such as AI to determine prices for shoppers based on things like their browsing history, past purchase history, location and more. 

Back in January of this year, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) announced that they would begin monitoring surveillance pricing, with the organization’s chair Lina M. Khan, saying in a statement on the website “Initial staff findings show that retailers frequently use people’s personal information to set targeted, tailored prices for goods and services—from a person’s location and demographics, down to their mouse movements on a webpage.” 

“The FTC should continue to investigate surveillance pricing practices because Americans deserve to know how their private data is being used to set the prices they pay and whether firms are charging different people different prices for the same good or service.”

Also in the study, it was reported that surveillance pricing can find a “person’s precise location or browser history can be frequently used to target individual consumers with different prices for the same goods and services.”

This news followed the FTC’s order to eight companies offering surveillance pricing—JPMorgan Chase, Revionics, Mastercard, Accenture, Bloomreach, PROS, Task Software and McKinsey & Co.—to provide information on consumers’ online behavior and characteristics in July 2024. 

“Firms that harvest Americans’ personal data can put people’s privacy at risk. Now, firms could be exploiting this vast trove of personal information to charge people higher prices,” Khan said in a statement on the FTC website at the time. “Americans deserve to know whether businesses are using detailed consumer data to deploy surveillance pricing, and the FTC’s inquiry will shed light on this shadowy ecosystem of pricing middlemen.”

Following both of those announcements, news surrounding the investment slowed down until Casar shared his plan to ban the internet tracking service nationally. 

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What to know about the Stop AI Price Gouging and Wage Fixing Act of 2025

In a recent sit-down interview with NBC News, Congressman Casar shared his plans for the Stop AI Price Gouging and Wage Fixing Act of 2025, detailing that the bill would ban the use of surveillance pricing and wage setting. 

“AI is a developing part of our lives, part of our world, but we need to make sure that it’s used for good and not being exploited,” he told the outlet. “We’re already starting to see that, and if we don’t intervene now and ban these sorts of price gouging and wage suppression right now, then I think it’s just going to spread all over the economy.”

Aside from the initial announcement, though, nothing has happened with the bill; however, Casar said that he’s not nervous about getting it passed on the congress floor. 

“I think that’s the kind of thing that pisses off Democratic and Republican and independent voters alike,” he explained. “You don’t have to be a progressive Democrat to say these gigantic corporations in the tech world should not be spying on us and then using what they learn to put it into AI and make our life more expensive.”

How to stop surveillance pricing

There are several ways to prevent shopping sites from tracking your spending and increasing prices on items you’re more likely to purchase. The first step is to be mindful of who you interact with online and what information you share with them. 

The second option is to shop online using an incognito browser, which prevents the internet from saving your browsing history, site data and/or cookies — just open a new incognito or private window from your browser’s menu (usually found under “File” or by right-clicking the browser icon) and shop away!