The Federal Trade Commission says it cannot outlaw the practice of using your personal data to decide how much to charge you. On August 19, it published a draft policy explaining, in unusual detail, how it plans to police the practice anyway — and the hypothetical offenders it chose to name are delivery apps, rideshare platforms, grocers, hotels, and online retailers.
The document, a proposed enforcement policy statement on “personalized pricing,” was approved for public comment by a 2-0 commission vote. Its core claim is simple: when a business uses personal data — browsing history, purchase records, location, household details — to set an individualized price and doesn’t clearly tell the customer, that failure to disclose “is likely to constitute an unfair or deceptive act or practice” under Section 5 of the FTC Act.
“When consumers see a listed price, they expect it to be same price that everyone else sees, not the retailer’s estimate of how much they are willing to pay based on their personal data,” FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson said in the announcement. “The FTC does not have the legal authority to ban personalized pricing in all circumstances, but businesses that fail to tell consumers how their personal data is being used to set a price may be in violation of the FTC Act and other laws we enforce.”
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The statement’s most revealing section is a list of seven scenarios the commission offers as examples of personalized pricing that would raise Section 5 concerns if not disclosed. They read like a tour of the modern data economy’s worst instincts:
- A food delivery company quoting higher prices to customers whose data suggests they are unlikely — or unable — to leave home to buy food themselves.
- A grocery chain charging a delivery customer more for milk because its data shows several children live in the household.
- A hotel raising the rate for a guest whose data indicates the trip is can’t-miss personal business, such as a funeral.
- A rideshare company charging a user more because the user hasn’t installed any competitor’s app.
- A rideshare company charging more for a trip to a medical facility when data suggests the rider is having a medical emergency.
- A retailer charging more for a home-security camera system because court filings show the customer was recently a crime victim.
- A retailer raising a product’s online price because location data shows the shopper is standing inside one of its own stores or parking lots.
The commission is careful to say these examples are “for discussion purposes only” and not definitive rulings. But regulators do not usually pick hypotheticals at random. Two of the seven involve rideshare apps and one involves food delivery — industries already under FTC scrutiny. The agency opened a public inquiry into fee practices in online food and grocery delivery in April, and in December 2025 it settled a deception lawsuit against Instacart for $60 million in consumer refunds.
The disclosure standard: “specially selected” isn’t enough
The draft doesn’t just say businesses must disclose. It says how. A compliant disclosure must be “clear and conspicuous” and cover three things: that the price is personalized at all, the basis for the personalization, and the types of data used. Telling a customer only that a price was “specially selected” for them, the statement says, “would likely be misleading because it omits important information.”
The logic rests on what economists call avoidance. A shopper who knows a site prices by profile can fight back — use a VPN or private browsing session, shop somewhere with uniform prices, or simply walk away. A shopper who doesn’t know can’t. That gap, in the FTC’s framing, is what turns quiet personalization into deception, and potentially into unfairness: an injury consumers “may not reasonably be able to avoid” because the retailer concealed it.
The commission also draws a boundary worth noting for anyone who has watched a rideshare fare jump on a rainy Friday. Surge pricing driven by local supply and demand is not personalized pricing, the statement says — consumers expect prices to move with market conditions that “affect everyone participating in the same market.” Insurance and credit, where individualized pricing is long-established and separately regulated, are also carved out. The target is markets where shoppers reasonably assume the listed price is everyone’s price.
What the economics actually shows
The statement is candid that nobody fully knows how widespread personalized pricing is: “The extent to which businesses currently use personalized pricing is not well understood, and the effects of personalized pricing on consumers are unclear.” The research it cites cuts in one direction, though — personalized pricing is “likely to increase business profits,” gains for some consumers come with losses for others, and, notably, “the more sophisticated personalized pricing practices become, the less likely consumers are to benefit.”
Real-world evidence has been accumulating. A December 2025 investigation by Consumer Reports, Groundwork Collaborative, and More Perfect Union found Instacart shoppers paying different prices for identical items from the same store at the same time, with gaps as large as 23 percent — a spread the groups estimated could cost a family more than $1,200 a year. Instacart disputed the findings, saying it does not use personal or demographic data to set prices and that the $1,200 figure reflected an “atypical” basket, but it subsequently ended the third-party price-testing program at issue. “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,” Grace Gedye, a senior policy analyst at Consumer Reports, told CBS News after the FTC’s announcement.
What this document is — and isn’t
A policy statement is not a rule. This one says so itself: it “does not confer any rights on any person and does not operate to bind the FTC or the public,” and in any enforcement action the commission still has to prove a violation of an existing law. The draft also pointedly declines to decide a harder question — whether some personalized pricing could be unfair even when fully disclosed. For now, the theory is disclosure or bust.
Still, the direction of travel is unmistakable. The statement is the culmination of the agency’s surveillance-pricing study, launched in 2024, and lands amid a run of pricing-transparency enforcement: the Fees Rule on junk fees in ticketing and lodging took effect in May 2025, StubHub agreed in April to refund $10 million in fees, and the same day as the personalized-pricing announcement, the FTC and Connecticut’s attorney general announced a $4 million settlement with a Connecticut car dealership over deceptive fees. Ferguson’s message to companies weighing pricing-by-profile was blunt: the commission “will not hesitate to enforce the law in this space.”
The public gets a say first. Once the statement is published in the Federal Register, there will be a 30-day window to submit comments under docket FTC-2026-1057 — and early comments from consumers, already visible on the docket, are running strongly in favor of cracking down.
Sources and methodology: This article is based on the FTC’s August 19, 2026 press release and the full text of the commission’s proposed enforcement policy statement regarding personalized pricing (Matter No. P034101), both published at ftc.gov; the FTC’s April 2026 delivery-fee inquiry and related enforcement releases; and CBS News MoneyWatch reporting (August 21, 2026) on the Consumer Reports/Instacart investigation and consumer comments. Quotes are taken verbatim from those documents. The comment window opens upon Federal Register publication, which had not occurred as of this writing.
