DAYTON — The Chairman of the Federal Trade Commission says a year after abruptly shutting down public comment on surveillance pricing, that his agency staff is still looking into the problem and how to address it.
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The comments came under questioning from lawmakers in a Senate Commerce Committee hearing.
“I take the issue of personalized pricing seriously. I have instructed staff to begin exploring whether the commission needs a policy statement on whether certain disclosures ought to be required if someone is using highly personalized pricing to set individualized prices,” FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson said.
Surveillance or personalized pricing is when different shoppers are given different prices without their knowledge while shopping online.
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The I-Team’s lead investigative reporter, John Bedell, previously talked to Dr. Riley Dugan, PhD, at the University of Dayton about surveillance pricing. Dugan is a professor and department head at UD’s School of Business Administration.
“Surveillance pricing is basically using information about a consumer, whether it be demographic information, past purchasing history, even mouse clicks on a web page, to sort of determine what is the most they’d be willing to pay for a product,” Dugan previously told the I-Team. “And then essentially charging them that amount, maximizing profits to the retail establishment …. It’s a form of individualized pricing that actually hurts the consumer rather than helps.” In a 2025 News Center 7 I-Team investigation, we teamed up with our sister stations from across the country, asking dozens of shoppers in eight cities to check the price of six products three times a day at some of the nation’s most popular stores. We found hard to explain pricing disparities including a TV that was priced nearly $200 more for one of our testers and a grill where two price testers were charged nearly $100 more than others.
“Consumers should not ever be profiled and charge different prices based on that profile. It is an abusive and unfair practice that uses consumer data against them,” Senator Jacky Rosen (D-Nevada) said.
In 2025, the day after President Trump was inaugurated, the FTC halted public comment for a surveillance pricing investigation and refused to tell the I-Team whether the investigation itself was shut down, telling us only “no comment.”
Senators pressed FTC commissioners on the same questions.
“It needs to be a robust investigation, because on top of everything else, when people are admitting that they are raising the prices, and then in this particular case, whether it’s an airline seat or a grocery store price, the public is frustrated,” Senator Maria Cantwell (D-Washington) said.
“I don’t want to commit to any particular rulemaking because we have to see what evidence we acquire. And I will follow the evidence where it leads,” Ferguson said.
Ferguson also pointed out that the FTC already launched an investigation into Instacart after it started a surveillance pricing experiment. Ferguson says that led to the company canceling the project.
The I-Team reached out to all the retailers we used in our price checks during our investigation. All the companies we reached out to either denied using surveillance pricing or did not respond.
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