Hartford, CT – Connecticut Governor Ned Lamont signed HB 5563 into law today, making Connecticut the second state in the nation to enact legislation aimed at curbing personalized pricing. Personalized pricing, also known as surveillance pricing, occurs when companies use consumers’ personal data, such as their browsing history, real-time location, inferred family size, or income to set prices or discounts for consumers. The law will go into effect on July 1, 2027.
“This law improves upon Maryland’s recently enacted law in several important ways and offers important new protections for consumers,” said Grace Gedye, senior policy analyst at Consumer Reports. “However, the law still has significant shortcomings. Businesses may feel it permits personalized pricing so long as they increase list prices and then offer personalized discounts to certain consumers based on their perceived willingness to pay. Nevertheless, the passage of this law represents real progress and demonstrates that states are committed to working on this affordability issue, and that they can improve the policy over time.”
To strengthen the new law, CR recommends the Connecticut legislature close loopholes and strengthen the bill next legislative session, including by:
- Tightening discount exemptions and conditioning them on public disclosure of the discounts and terms, so that businesses cannot secretly profile consumers and offer them different prices, and so that all consumers who are eligible for a discount can receive it
- Making clear that consumers can take legal action if their rights under the law are violated, rather than petitioning the Attorney General—whose resources are limited—to act on their behalf
Many other states are considering surveillance pricing bans including California, New Jersey, New York, and others.
Consumer Reports recently 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.
Contact: cyrus.rassool@consumer.org