An age-old practice of targeted pricing is now giving way to a new frontier of surveillance pricing. Recent media reports indicate that a growing number of grocery stores[1] and retailers may be using algorithms to establish targeted prices. This means that consumers may now be subjected to surveillance pricing when they shop for anything, big or small, online or in person: a house, a car, even their weekly groceries. [3]Today, using its 6(b) authority, the Federal Trade Commission will begin studying whether and how firms are using detailed consumer data to deploy surveillance pricing for consumers. The 6(b) study seeks to understand how surveillance pricing works, including the types of data companies use to fuel their algorithms and where that data is sourced from.

Source: Forbes July 23, 2024 13:47 UTC