Surveillance pricing bill with a poison pill.
Beware surveillance pricing bans where the legislation promotes surveillance pricing.
This shouldn't be a thing, but often the industry lobbyists write controlled-opposition legislation that is then adopted by politicians who are clueless, craven, careless, or on the take.
The Economic Populist Gov. Wes Moore Claims Maryland Banned Surveillance Pricing for Groceries. It Didn't. The new law is riddled with loopholes, exemptions, and other problems. Economic Liberties Apr 29, 2026 Findings from a Federal Trade Commission survey released last year found that clients of third-party surveillance pricing software include grocery stores, apparel retailers, health and beauty retailers, home goods and furnishing stores, hardware stores, travel firms, and department stores. FTC staff found that “consumer behaviors ranging from mouse movements on a webpage to the type of products that consumers leave unpurchased in an online shopping cart can be tracked and used by retailers to tailor consumer pricing.” Contrary to Moore’s assertion, this is less about the checkout counter at an actual grocery store (though QR code price tags and required in-app purchasing are adapting to make in-person surveillance pricing more prevalent) and more about online commerce, where it’s possible to collect massive profiles of individuals, and prevent them from knowing that they’re being charged a different price than everyone else as they move across the web. Maryland’s bill suffers from several problems that will render it ineffective – and it only applies to groceries and grocery-delivery, leaving a wide swathe of the economy untouched. First, in a huge red flag, it allows surveillance pricing as long as a corporation claims a shopper “consented” to receiving the price, despite decades of research showing that consent policies don’t meaningfully prevent corporate abuse. (emphasis added)
They write supposedly regulatory laws that in action preemptively codify the actual thing the law is supposed to prevent.
The same thing has been deployed with data center legislation claimed to be environmental, and has been attempted with medical mask legislation sold as disability justice.
My letter to reps:
Surveillance pricing should be outright banned. Nobody should be tracked online at all in the first place, and I don't want to hear about any exceptions where someone "consents" because we know that consent policies don't prevent corporate abuse, they just serve as legal cover to keep corporations from being at all held accountable. We need to hold these companies accountable, and prevent the damage being done in the first place.
Please feel free to copy or repurpose for your own letters to reps.
