October 13, 2026

The Federal Trade Commission seems poised to join the backlash against personalized pricing. That would be a mistake. The practice remains poorly understood.

Personalized pricing, or its more sinister name, “surveillance pricing,” is a method of setting prices whereby companies use personal data to make individualized offers. According to a new FTC proposal, personalized pricing likely constitutes an “unfair or deceptive” practice unless the seller discloses “the fact that the price is personalized, the basis of that personalization, and the type of data used.”

The agency’s conclusion is premature and relies on incomplete information. Don’t take my word for it. The FTC concedes as much, stating in its August enforcement bulletin that “the extent to which businesses currently use personalized pricing is not well understood, and the effects of personalized pricing on consumers are unclear.”

Nor do we have a grasp of its prevalence. Remarkably, the FTC’s proposal doesn’t cite a single instance of a company’s using personalized pricing.

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