The FTC extended to September 25 the public comment period on a proposed policy statement covering companies that use personal data to set individual prices. The proposal is not a ban, but a disclosure standard enforced under existing law — and Rhode Islanders can weigh in.
Uprise RI · Kaelen Valeborn · September 6, 2026
The FTC extended to September 25 the public comment period on a proposed policy statement covering companies that use personal data to set individual prices. The proposal is not a ban, but a disclosure standard enforced under existing law — and Rhode Islanders can weigh in.
Rhode Island's new privacy law only bars retailers from charging more when a customer opts out of data use; the FTC proposal would reach hidden data-driven pricing more broadly, and residents have until September 25 to comment.
A grocery chain's software concludes there are children in your household, so your milk costs a little more than your neighbor's. A hotel's booking system infers you're traveling for a funeral and quotes you a higher rate. A rideshare app notices you don't have a competitor's app installed and raises your fare. A retailer sees you browsing from its own parking lot and figures you're not going anywhere.
None of those are allegations against a named company. They are the Federal Trade Commission's own hypotheticals, written into a proposed enforcement policy statement the agency released August 19 — and as of today, the public has until September 25 to tell the commission what it thinks.
The FTC announced today that it extended the comment period by seven days from the original September 18 deadline. The docket is FTC-2026-1057-0001. Anyone can file, including any Rhode Islander who has ever wondered whether the price on the screen is the price everyone else sees.
I read the proposed statement. It does less than the word "surveillance" suggests and more than a press release lets on.
The FTC is not outlawing personalized pricing. The document says so directly: Congress has not given the commission authority to prohibit the practice in all circumstances. What the agency proposes instead is a description of how it may apply Section 5 of the FTC Act — the law against unfair or deceptive acts or practices — to companies that use personal data to set an individual's price without saying so. The statement is nonbinding. It doesn't bind the commission, doesn't bind businesses, creates no private right to sue and doesn't by itself establish that anyone broke the law. In any enforcement case, the FTC would still have to prove a violation of an existing statute or rule.
Definitions carry the weight here. The FTC defines personalized pricing as using personal data and the inferences drawn from it — estimated willingness to pay, likelihood of comparison shopping — to set a price for one consumer. That is distinct from prices that move with supply and demand, regional taxes, time of day or market conditions that hit everyone. It is also distinct from insurance and credit, where individual characteristics have always shaped the price of risk.
The legal theory runs two ways. Deception first: a retailer that represents or implies a price is static or generally available when it is actually personalized may be misleading customers, as may one that labels a higher personalized price a discount or misstates the data behind it. Then unfairness: under the FTC Act, a practice is unfair if it causes substantial injury consumers cannot reasonably avoid and that is not outweighed by benefits to consumers or competition. The proposal argues concealed personalization can stop consumers from correcting bad data about themselves, changing their behavior, avoiding data collection or simply shopping somewhere else.
The remedy the FTC sketches is disclosure, in three parts. In markets where consumers reasonably expect a common price, businesses should say that the price is personalized, on what basis and what types of data were used. A label like a "specially selected" price would likely fall short, the statement says.
FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson framed it plainly when the statement was released: consumers generally expect a listed price to be the same price others see, not a price built on a retailer's estimate of what they would tolerate.
One question the commission left open on purpose: whether some personalized-pricing practices could be unfair even when fully disclosed. The statement takes no position on that yet.
The proposal rests on a study the FTC started in July 2024, when the commission voted 5-0 to issue orders under Section 6(b) — an information-gathering power, not an enforcement one — to eight companies: Mastercard, Revionics, Bloomreach, JPMorgan Chase, Task Software, PROS, Accenture and McKinsey & Co. It wanted to know what pricing products they sold, what data fed them, who bought them and what happened to consumers.
The FTC Office of Technology's January 2025 staff perspective listed the inputs those tools could draw on: IP address, device type, browser, language settings, mouse movements, scrolling, cart activity, purchase history, location, loyalty data, shipping address and information from data brokers and other third-party platforms. The intermediaries examined collectively served at least 250 clients across grocery, apparel, health and beauty, home goods, convenience stores, hardware, general merchandise, travel, credit cards, car rental and sports betting. Staff described those findings as preliminary and said they did not assess whether any company had acted illegally.
The proposed statement itself says the agency does not yet have a clear picture of how widespread the practice is or what it does to consumers. That is part of why it is asking.
On August 27, five trade groups — the Retail Industry Leaders Association, the National Retail Federation, the National Association of Convenience Stores, the National Grocers Association and FMI–The Food Industry Association — asked the FTC to push the deadline to November 17. Their letter said the proposal raised legal, operational, technology, data-governance and loyalty-program questions that could not be answered in the original window. The FTC's release today does not mention the request or explain why it chose a week.
The industry's substantive argument deserves a fair hearing. The coalition worries the statement blurs the line between individualized higher prices and the coupons, rewards and loyalty discounts customers sign up for on purpose. Alden Abbott, a former FTC general counsel, filed a comment through the Mercatus Center yesterday urging the commission to target actual deception, preserve individualized discounts and reject the idea that consumer expectations alone create a duty to disclose.
The economics back neither side cleanly. A 2023 study by Dubé and Misra in the Journal of Political Economy found personalized pricing raised profits and reduced total consumer surplus in a field experiment — while more than 60% of consumers in that setting benefited. A 2024 American Economic Review paper by Rhodes and Zhou concluded the effect depends on competition and market coverage, and that consumers can be worse off when only some firms in a market can personalize. Same tool, opposite outcomes, depending on who holds it.
Rhode Island's Data Transparency and Privacy Protection Act took effect January 1. Section 6-48.1-5 covers for-profit companies doing business here or targeting Rhode Islanders that handle personal data of at least 35,000 customers (excluding data used solely for payment transactions), or at least 10,000 customers while earning more than 20% of gross revenue from selling personal data. Those companies may not deny goods or services, charge a different price or rate, or lower quality because a customer opted out of data use. Voluntary loyalty, rewards, premium-feature, discount and club-card programs are carved out.
That is a narrower shield than what the FTC is discussing. The state law protects you from being penalized for exercising a privacy right; it does not govern whether a retailer may use the data of customers who never opted out to set their price.
Two General Assembly bills tried to go further this year. Rep. Alex Marszalkowski, a Cumberland Democrat, introduced H-7849, the Surveillance Pricing and Online Retailing Act, on February 27. It would bar an online retailer from knowingly applying an algorithmic price increase — a price above the seller's baseline when an automated system is materially influenced by geolocation, device identifiers, browsing or purchase history or demographics — and would require disclosure of certain other data-influenced prices. It was referred to House Corporations. Sen. Dawn Euer, a Newport Democrat whose district includes Jamestown, introduced S-2428 on February 6; it would make dynamic and surveillance pricing deceptive trade practices in Rhode Island, with exceptions for ordinary discounts, rebates, loyalty programs and documented cost differences unrelated to a specific consumer's data. Senate Commerce heard it March 24. Neither bill has been enacted.
The testimony on those bills previews the fight the FTC is about to referee. The Rhode Island Retail Federation opposed H-7849, arguing a uniform baseline price is hard to calculate in online commerce and that retailers use data for inventory, shipping, fraud prevention, supply chains and competition, not only to size up shoppers. Lyft warned that a broad restriction on geolocation-based pricing could interfere with the driver-rider matching and local supply-and-demand pricing rideshare depends on. The ACLU of Rhode Island backed S-2428, describing surveillance pricing as using precise location, purchase history or browser history to charge different people different prices for the same goods or services.
Comments go through Regulations.gov under docket FTC-2026-1057-0001. The FTC posts submissions publicly and cautions commenters not to include sensitive or confidential personal information, so leave out anything you would not want searchable. Say what you expect when you see a price, whether you would want to know it was built for you, and what a useful disclosure would actually look like on a phone screen.
The deadline is September 25. Retailers asked for November. You have three weeks.
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This bill bans businesses from using real-time demand (surge pricing) or personal consumer data to adjust prices for goods and services.
This bill bans online stores from using your personal data to charge you higher prices than other customers.
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