Consumer Reports sent a letter to Speaker Julie Menin and other members of the New York City Council, urging them to strengthen Int 891, a measure to ban personalized pricing.
Personalized pricing, also known as surveillance pricing, is when a company uses personal data that they’ve gathered about a consumer—their online search history, realtime location, inferences about family structure, health conditions, income, and more—to change the price of a product or the discount offered to specific consumer.
If enacted, New York City would become the fifth jurisdiction to ban personalized pricing, after Maryland, Connecticut, New Jersey, and Seattle, WA.
Consumer Reports urges the council to strengthen the bill before passing it. The letter includes three recommendations:
- Close ‘location data’ loophole
- Tighten or remove the exemption for the use of purchase history data
- Remove corrective action request language in enforcement section
The final suggestion is especially important. The language in the most recent draft of the bill would make the law unenforceable in practice. It nullifies the deterrent effect, and all but ensures that consumers harmed by surveillance pricing are never made whole. It would also make New York City’s law the weakest in the nation when it comes to enforcement—putting it behind New Jersey and Connecticut.
For more, see the full letter linked above.
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.