# Surveillance Pricing **Domain:** Consumer Protection / Personalization / Data Economy **Doc Type:** Concept Node **Maturity:** Developing **Concept Hub:** [[wiki/Affordance Allocation|Affordance Allocation]] **Aliases:** individualized pricing; personalized pricing ## Definition **Surveillance pricing is the setting of individualized prices for the same goods and services from granular personal data such as location, browsing history, mouse movements and abandoned-cart behavior.** The U.S. Federal Trade Commission opened a Section 6(b) study in July 2024 with orders to eight intermediary firms, including Mastercard, Accenture, McKinsey, PROS, Revionics and Bloomreach, and released initial findings on January 17, 2025; one illustrative scenario described a consumer profiled as a new parent being shown higher-priced baby thermometers. ## Role in the Corpus [[articles/The New Dictionary of the Machine Regime|The New Dictionary of the Machine Regime]] cites surveillance pricing as the empirical case for indexical truth: once treatment is individualized, a platform may accurately report that it has no single price because it has no single user. ## Relationships - **Concepts:** [[wiki/Affordance Allocation|Affordance Allocation]] · [[wiki/Contextual Integrity|Contextual Integrity]] · [[wiki/Surveillance|Surveillance]] · [[wiki/Regime-Conditioned Semantics|Regime-Conditioned Semantics]] · [[wiki/experience personalization|Experience Personalization]]. - **Source article:** [[articles/The New Dictionary of the Machine Regime|The New Dictionary of the Machine Regime]]. ## Sources / Provenance - U.S. Federal Trade Commission, ["Surveillance Pricing Study Indicates Wide Range of Personal Data Used to Set Individualized Consumer Prices"](https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2025/01/ftc-surveillance-pricing-study-indicates-wide-range-personal-data-used-set-individualized-consumer) (January 17, 2025).