For all of 2025, despite a flurry of proposals, not a single state managed to ban “surveillance pricing.” This spring, that changed. In April, Maryland became the first state to prohibit food retailers and delivery services from using consumers’ personal data to set prices. In June, Connecticut became the second. California and New York are considering similar measures as part of a broader wave of efforts to limit surveillance pricing.
Yet the real issue is not fundamentally about pricing. It is about how companies choose to use data, algorithms, and increasingly AI: when technology lets them understand customers and workers in unprecedented detail, will they use that insight to create value or to extract it?
