A Hotel Can Charge You More Because You're Flying to a Funeral. Nobody Has to Tell You.

If a company knows enough about you, it can guess what you’ll pay. Then it can charge you exactly that, and today it doesn’t have to mention it.

That’s not a theory. It’s the list of examples the Federal Trade Commission published on August 19, and the list reads like a confession.

What’s on it

A food delivery service charging you more because your data says you’re unlikely to leave the house. A grocery chain raising the price of milk for shoppers with kids at home. A hotel quoting a higher rate to someone whose travel data suggests a funeral. A rideshare app charging more when it can see you don’t have a competitor’s app installed. A retailer marking up a security camera for someone flagged as a crime victim.

Those are the FTC’s own scenarios, in a proposed enforcement policy statement the Commission voted 2-0 to put out for public comment.

The practice has a bland name. Personalized pricing. The FTC’s definition is less bland: using browsing history, location, demographics or purchase patterns to set a price based on your “estimated willingness to pay or likelihood of comparison shopping.”

Translation: the price tag isn’t a price. It’s a guess about you.

What the FTC is actually proposing

Not a ban. The Commission stated it hasn’t been granted the authority to ban personalized pricing outright.

What it’s proposing is a label. If a company personalizes your price, it should have to tell you three things clearly: that the price is personalized, what the personalization is based on, and what data fed it. Soft language like “specially selected” doesn’t count.

Chairman Andrew Ferguson framed it this way: “When consumers see a listed price, they expect it to be the same price that everyone else sees, not the retailer’s estimate of how much they are willing to pay based on their personal data.”

A disclosure rule stops nothing, though. It makes the company say it out loud, and a company already pricing this way will find a sentence it can live with. Consumer Reports is pushing the FTC to prohibit the practice instead of labeling it, which tells you what they think a label is worth.

Better than nothing. Not much better.

Do this

Comment. The docket is FTC-2026-1057 on regulations.gov and the window closes September 18. It takes five minutes, the file is public, and the agency quotes it later when it defends whatever it does next.

Then price-check yourself. Before any large online purchase, load the same item twice: once logged in on your usual device, once in a private window on a different network. If the two numbers disagree, you just found out what your data is worth.

Insurers run a version of this on your policy, and one state has already moved on it. We covered that in Part of Your Home Insurance Bill Is a Bet on Whether You’ll Shop.

Where it’s already law

Your state may beat the FTC to it. New Jersey enacted its Fair Price Protection Act on July 23, banning personalized algorithmic pricing for grocery retailers and delivery platforms. Maryland’s surveillance pricing ban for food retailers starts October 1, and Connecticut’s disclosure requirement starts the same day. New York’s One Fair Price Act cleared the legislature on June 10 and is sitting on the governor’s desk.

File this away for October 1. If you buy groceries online in Maryland or Connecticut, the number on the screen that week is supposed to be the number everyone sees.

How Candid Yak makes money. Some of the products we write about pay us if you apply or sign up through our links. That never changes our verdict, our rankings, or the numbers in this article. We call a bad deal a bad deal whether it pays us or not. Some brands shown in our comparison tools are placeholder examples while we finalize partner agreements, and we label them as such.