Consumer Reports submitted testimony to the Hawai’i Senate Committee on Labor and Technology in support of HB 2458 with suggested amendments.
Surveillance pricing, also sometimes referred to as “personalized” pricing, is when a company uses personal data that they’ve gathered about a consumer—like data about their online search history, their real time location, or inferences about family structure, health conditions, or income—to set the price of a product or determine the discount offered to a consumer.
What does the bill do?
HB 2458 would prohibit the use of a consumer’s personal data gathered by electronic surveillance technology to set a customized price for food. It protects transparently offered discounts, including discounts offered to the public and common group discounts. It exempts restaurants.
CR’s suggested change:
CR suggested using a consensus definition of personal data. Companies may collect hundreds of data points about a consumer, but not associate that information with their name or email address, and instead associate it with a unique identifier such as a cookie, device identifier, or IP address. The bill’s current definition, on the other hand, appears to be derived from data breach notification laws that cover only a narrow range of personal data, and has many gaps that would not cover common, invasive profiling techniques that companies employ in 2026.
For more details about the bill and examples of surveillance pricing, see the testimony linked above.