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Consumer Reports supports HB 1264, prohibiting surveillance pricing

Consumer Reports supports Colorado bill HB 1264, which would prohibit surveillance pricing and wages with reasonable exemptions. Surveillance pricing, also sometimes referred to as “personalized” pricing, is when a company uses data that they’ve gathered about a consumer—often without the consumer’s knowledge or consent—to set the price of a product or the discount offered to a consumer. 

HB 1264 prohibits the use of data related to a person’s characteristics, behavior, or biometrics to automatically and secretly inform the price or wage they are offered. This includes, for example, data about a consumer’s race or weight, their parenthood status, their genetic information, the geometry of their face, their political affiliations, and their web-browsing history. The bill also prohibits the secret and automated use of surveillance data to target groups of individuals with prices. It has several reasonable exemptions, such as discounts for groups that are consistent with antidiscrimination law, that are disclosed publicly, and that are based on consumers affirmatively and voluntarily providing information 

Surveillance pricing can be difficult to detect, because consumers rarely have a view into what information a company has about them, or what the prices they see are based on. Still, enterprising journalists have discovered examples. 

 

For more, please see the attached PDF.