Washington, DC – In response to the Federal Trade Commission’s announcement today that it is seeking public comment on a proposed enforcement policy statement regarding personalized pricing, Grace Gedye, senior policy analyst at Consumer Reports issued the following statement.
“It is encouraging to see the FTC tackle this bipartisan issue. Nobody should have to pay more for groceries or other essential goods because a company knows what they’re searching for online, what their income is, the makeup of their household, or where they go.
“The draft statement from the FTC makes clear that if companies personalize prices without adequate disclosure to the consumer, it likely violates Section 5 of the FTC Act, which prohibits unfair or deceptive acts or practices affecting commerce.
“Today’s proposed statement emphasizes that companies should provide detailed disclosures when using personal data to set individualized prices—including which pieces of data about a consumer they use to modify a price. For those disclosures to be useful, consumers also need to understand if the price they are seeing is higher or lower than the original price, or the average price.
“Ultimately though, it should not be consumers’ responsibility to read detailed disclosures on each item while shopping online to avoid being hit with a higher price. Instead, the FTC, Congress, and states should take action to prohibit companies from using consumers’ individual data to personalize prices in the first place. Consumer Reports has been proud to support several bills that do just that. We look forward to working with the FTC on this critical consumer protection issue.”
Background:
States have taken action to sign bills into law to ban the practice of surveillance pricing, including Maryland, Connecticut and New Jersey. California is also currently considering a ban. Additional information on Consumer Reports’ campaign to Make the Price Right can be found here.
In May 2025, Consumer Reports investigated Kroger’s consumer data practices and found that they were collecting vast data profiles for individual shoppers, with inferences about their income, family size, education level, gender, and more. One shopper who requested their data under a state privacy law received a 62-page profile.
In December 2025, CR, along with partners Groundwork Collaborative and More Perfect Union, published an investigation into Instacart’s pricing tactics. CR had nearly 400 consumers shop for the same basket of goods at the same time. Analysis of the shopping data found that consumers were paying different prices for the same products from the same store at the same time. The investigation found that Instacart’s algorithmic pricing experiments could result in price differences as high as 23% for certain products and could cost families more than $1,200 a year at checkout. Soon after, Instacart announced in a company blog post that it would end the program that resulted in different shoppers being shown different prices for groceries on its platform. However, Instacart told CR that it would still allow its partners—grocery retailers and food brands—to test different types of promotions and discounts on their customers through the platform.
CR’s most recent investigation of Uber and Lyft’s AI-driven pricing tactics found that the companies routinely charge different customers significantly different prices for the same rides ordered at roughly the same time. CR also found that both apps regularly advertised supposed discounts off what appeared to be inflated original prices. (Note: CR defines “same rides” as trips from the same starting point to the same destination priced within minutes—and often seconds—of one another.)
Contact: cyrus.rassool@consumer.org