A ride-share app sees you're trying to get to a hospital and charges you more. A grocery delivery service notices your household has several kids and bumps up the price of milk. A hotel figures out you're attending a funeral and decides that's a great moment to squeeze you. The Federal Trade Commission has officially noticed, and it is not pleased.
What the FTC Actually Said
On Wednesday, the FTC released a proposed enforcement policy statement warning companies that use customers' personal data to set individualized prices that they could be breaking federal law. According to CBS News, the commission's position is pretty simple: when you see a price on a shelf or a product listing online, you assume that price is the same for everyone. The FTC agrees with you. Companies doing otherwise without telling you are, in the agency's view, engaging in deceptive practices that violate the FTC Act.
FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson was direct about where the agency's authority kicks in. The FTC cannot ban personalized pricing outright in every context, but it can absolutely go after businesses that fail to disclose how they're using your personal data to decide what to charge you. That's the line. Hide the ball, pay the price.
This Is Not a Hypothetical Problem
Here is where things stop being abstract. In December 2025, an investigation by Consumer Reports, the Groundwork Collaborative, and More Perfect Union found that Instacart customers were paying different prices for the exact same goods from the exact same store at the exact same time. Not slightly different. CBS News reports the gap was as much as 23%, which can add up to over $1,200 a year for a family. Instacart subsequently said it would end the price testing program, which is a very corporate way of saying "we got caught."
And Instacart wasn't alone. A separate Consumer Reports investigation in May 2025 found that Kroger had been quietly building detailed profiles of individual shoppers, collecting data on income, family size, education level, gender, and more. The grocery chain serving your neighborhood apparently knows quite a lot about you. Whether they were using that data to set prices is the question everyone should be asking them directly.
Who Gets Hurt the Most
The FTC's examples of potentially illegal personalized pricing read like a list of moments when people are most vulnerable. The funeral traveler. The parent buying milk for their kids. The person who genuinely needs to get to the hospital. These are not edge cases cooked up by an overzealous regulator. These are the exact pressure points that pricing algorithms are designed to detect and exploit.
Consumer Reports senior policy analyst Grace Gedye put it plainly in a statement to CBS News: "Nobody should have to pay more for groceries or other essential goods because a company knows what they're searching for online, what their income is, the makeup of their household or where they go." And she made a point worth underlining: the people least equipped to protect themselves from this are also the people most likely to get hammered by it. Shoppers who don't know how to use a VPN or a private browser, who don't have time to comb through disclosure policies, who are already stretched thin. That's not a coincidence. That's the feature, not the bug.
The Disclosure Problem
The FTC's proposed remedy centers on disclosure. If you're going to price people individually based on their data profiles, you have to tell them that's what you're doing, clearly and specifically. Not buried in a terms-of-service document. Not hidden behind a vague reference to "personalized experiences." You have to tell shoppers, according to the commission, that the price they're seeing reflects the company's analysis of their personal data and their estimated willingness to pay.
Gedye isn't fully satisfied with that fix, and honestly, fair enough. As she told CBS News: "Ultimately, it should not be consumers' responsibility to read detailed disclosures on each item while shopping online to avoid being hit with a higher price." She's right. Disclosure is better than nothing, but mandatory disclosure in a world where almost nobody reads disclosures is a pretty thin shield. The FTC knows this. That's why this is a starting point, not a finish line.
Public Comments Are Not Mincing Words
The FTC's proposal is already open for public comment, and the response has been notably sharp. Consumer Sarah Burdell wrote that personalized pricing "undermines fair markets by replacing transparent pricing with hidden, data-driven discrimination between buyers," adding that people without the time, technical literacy, or resources to detect it bear a disproportionate burden. Another commenter, Michael Derhammer, called for equal prices for all people and restrictions on how private data can be used in pricing decisions.
This is the part that sometimes gets lost in policy coverage: real people are noticing this, naming it, and pushing back on it. The comments aren't coming from industry groups or think tanks hedging their language carefully. They're coming from shoppers who are tired of being profiled and then charged more for the privilege.
The Dingo Take
You are supposed to believe that the free market produces fair prices through competition. What it actually produces, when left to its own devices and given access to your entire browsing history, purchase record, household composition, and income estimate, is a system that figures out the maximum amount of stress you're under and charges accordingly. The funeral surcharge is not a satire. The hospital ride markup is not hypothetical. These are the logical endpoints of letting algorithms run pricing without any rules, and companies built them on purpose.
The FTC's move here is real and worth crediting. An enforcement policy statement is not nothing, and Chairman Ferguson is signaling that the commission will actually use its authority against companies that hide the ball. But let's be clear about what this policy cannot do: it cannot stop personalized pricing. It can only require companies to admit they're doing it. In a world where people click "agree" on terms of service without reading them, that is a meaningful but limited protection.
Instacart ended its price testing program when investigators caught it charging people different prices for the same product at the same time. They didn't end it because of a disclosure requirement. They ended it because they got embarrassed publicly. That tells you something important about what actually changes corporate behavior. The FTC's policy is a step. The next step is enforcement with teeth sharp enough that companies fear the consequences more than they enjoy the margins.
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