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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. 

If you’re in any type of loyalty program at all, or clicked “yes” or “I agree” at some point, to a store’s program to get coupons or whatever, you will probably have signed your right away to be protected by surveillance pricing law in Maryland. And we all know that nobody reads every little part of all those things one has to agree to in order to get the sale price. These programs have been a problem for decades, the realtime corporate surveillance has just put the unfairness and target marketing exploitation on hyperdrive.

iapp - Maryland enacts a first-of-its-kind surveillance pricing law, but there are loopholes Questions around baseline pricing, loyalty program exemptions and enforcement may limit how Maryland’s grocery pricing rules work in practice. Published 13 May 2026 Four loopholes. The legislation leaves four potential paths for businesses to bypass the surveillance pricing ban and keep earning extra money from consumers. No baseline price. Both prohibitions require proving the consumer paid a higher price than they otherwise would have paid. However, the bill does not define a baseline price for comparison. Any price charged will be interpreted as a discount from the implied price, even if the retailer sets a nominal regular price and offers personalized discounts. This means consumers who do not receive a discount may have to pay a higher price for the same product. The segment gap. Both prohibitions contained in §13-321 apply only to prices set for one consumer. Dynamic pricing prohibition refers to “a specific consumer.” Personal data use prohibition refers to “a single consumer.” At first, the enrolled version of the law contained language allowing banning of the use of personal data to set prices for “a specific consumer or a group of consumers,” was intentionally removed from the final bill. Loyalty programs carve-out. The bill explicitly provides that any discounts given by food retailers to consumers participating in loyalty, membership, or rewards programs and subscription pricing are not covered by this prohibition. Loyalty programs are the primary way to collect granular data. Thus, removing loyalty programs from the ban list means removing the biggest chunk of surveillance activity. Limited enforcement mechanisms. This is perhaps the most significant loophole. It is also the only one that might affect plaintiffs’ decisions. There is no private right of action regarding surveillance pricing ban provided in §13-321. No citizen of Maryland may sue the violator for any compensation or injunctive relief because of a violation of this prohibition. (emphasis added)

My letter to reps:

We need laws on surveillance pricing that do not default allow a loophole to treat people unfairly because they’re in a store “loyalty program” for people who have opted in to get some coupon or signed up for a mailing list. Meaningful crackdown on this abusive business practice needs to not set up a situation to blame the customer for not having read some tiny little print somewhere on a page they were anxious to get past in order to move on with their day. There should also be a mandate for stores to set baseline prices storewide in order to not obfuscate what they’re doing with discounts, coupons, and sneak in surveillance pricing and hyper-individual target marketing that way. Transparency should be required.

Please feel free to copy or repurpose for your own letters to reps.

We Found The Radical Solution To Surveillance Pricing More Perfect Union Jun 10, 2026 To understand the danger surveillance pricing bills face, we wanted to investigate how those lobbyists gutted the Maryland bill so effectively. We looked at public disclosure documents for some clues. Members of the state Senate committees debating the bill were gifted over $10,000 in dinners by the Maryland Retail Alliance at restaurants serving up salmon Wellington and $150 Wagyu tomahawk ribeye. I mean, I don’t know if that’s what they ordered, but if a lobbyist was paying, you’d be stupid not to. The disclosures don’t actually show what was discussed, but the first dinner was just one day after the legislature began considering the surveillance pricing bill. The Maryland Retail Alliance initially opposed it until those carve-outs were added to make the bill impotent. On their board of directors: executives from Target and Amazon. And the bill’s passage got high praise from the head of the Chamber of Progress, a former Google exec. What we’ve seen in terms of pushback on a lot of these bills is attempts to get exemptions from the protection that really swallow the rule. Now, this blunder could go national — a way for lawmakers to say they’ve banned the practice, but in reality, not.

Gotta burn ’em all

https://pivottoai.libsyn.com/20260625-office-workers-are-spending-way-too-much-on-ai-too - podcast

time: 5 min 34 sec

https://pivot-to-ai.com/2026/06/25/office-workers-are-spending-way-too-much-on-ai-too/ - blog post