Picture two people standing on the same Bushwick corner, both opening the same app to order the same ride to the same address. The one whose phone is at 12 percent gets quoted a higher fare than the one at 84 percent. That is not a glitch. It is a business model, and on June 4 the New York State Legislature voted to outlaw it.

Both chambers passed the One Fair Price Act (S.8623B in the Senate, A.9349B in the Assembly), a bill that bans companies from using your personal data, including your browsing history, your income, your device type, and yes, your device battery level, to charge different people different prices for the exact same product. The Senate cleared it 39 to 21. Attorney General Letitia James, who spent the spring rallying for it, called it “a big victory in our fight to ban surveillance pricing and help make life more affordable in New York.” It now sits on Governor Kathy Hochul’s desk awaiting her signature.

The bill targets what’s called surveillance pricing. When you land on a shopping site, the platform is reading you. According to the Federal Trade Commission, the systems behind individualized pricing ingest your IP address, your device type, your browser and language settings, and your behavior down to “mouse movement or how far down they scroll,” then infer things like your location, your purchase intent, and even your emotional state. A pricing algorithm takes that profile and estimates the single highest number you, specifically, are likely to pay. Two people can open the same listing at the same second and see two different prices.