This isn’t frightening at all…😳
By John S.W. MacDonald
May 1, 2026
Maryland this week became the first state in America to ban grocery stores and third-party delivery services like DoorDash from using customers’ personal data to set higher prices.
The practice — supported by artificial intelligence and known as dynamic pricing or surveillance pricing — can lead to two consumers paying different amounts for the same item from the same retailer, at roughly the same time. If a store knows, for example, that one of those customers lives in a wealthier neighborhood, it can charge that person a higher price.
The bill enforcing the ban, the Protection From Predatory Pricing Act, goes into effect on Oct. 1. Merchants face fines of $10,000 for running afoul of the law, and penalties of $25,000 for repeat offenses.
“At a time when technology can predict what we need, when we need it, when we’ll pay for it and also when we’ll pay more for it,” Gov. Wes Moore of Maryland, a Democrat, said at a signing ceremony for the bill on Tuesday. “And at a time when we are watching how big companies are then using those analytics against us to make record profits, Maryland is not just pushing back. Maryland is pushing forward.”….
Some consumer advocates and rights groups, however, said the bill did not go nearly far enough.
“We appreciate Gov. Wes Moore and the Maryland legislature for making the issue of surveillance pricing a top priority during this legislative session,” Grace Gedye, a policy analyst at Consumer Reports, said in a statement. “Unfortunately, this law has too many industry-friendly loopholes and weak enforcement provisions.”
Among those problematic carve-outs, according to Consumer Reports and other privacy advocates, is the fact that the bill does not apply to customer loyalty programs, which are popular with consumers and harvest significant amounts of their data.
“Data has become the currency of retail strategy, and loyalty programs are really among the most powerful vehicles for collecting it,” said Stephanie Nguyen, a senior fellow at the Center for Law and the Economy at Columbia Law School.
Loyalty programs can pry out potent insights about consumer behavior, including how often people shop and how much they are willing to pay for a pair of sneakers or a six-pack of toilet paper, said Ms. Nguyen, who has studied such programs and worked as a chief technologist at the Federal Trade Commission under the Biden administration.
Consumer Reports and Mr. McBrien took issue with the way the Maryland law prohibits only price increases, not decreases. Mr. McBrien described a scenario in which a retailer might raise prices across the board while using dynamic pricing to lower prices for a few targeted consumers, thus increasing costs for most customers.
Mr. McBrien and Ms. Nguyen also criticized the law for giving enforcement power to Maryland’s attorney general and prohibiting individual consumers from suing violators.
In response to criticisms of the bill, a spokeswoman for Mr. Moore, Rhyan Lake, said that the law “represents an important step toward transparency, and will help protect Marylanders’ pockets at the supermarket as the governor continues fighting to make life a bit easier for hard-working people.”
The reality, Mr. McBrien said, is that many retailers are using algorithms to make inferences about human behavior, and they tend to be about how much someone is willing to spend.
“Businesses are no longer competing on price,” he said.
