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.
The FTC spelled it out in a study released January 17, 2025, after ordering eight pricing-technology middlemen to hand over their methods. One example the agency described: a seller can confirm through your recent purchases that you are a new parent, confirm through your recent searches that your baby is sick, and then surface a pricier “fast-delivery” baby thermometer, because it has calculated that a scared parent at 11 p.m. is not going to comparison shop. The study, summarized by law firm McCarter and English, found this profiling runs across grocery, apparel, and other everyday retail.
The battery example isn’t hypothetical. A 2023 investigation by a Brussels newspaper, recounted by Al Jazeera, found that the identical Uber ride cost 17.56 euros when ordered from a phone at 12 percent battery and 16.60 euros from one at 84 percent. Roughly a dollar more, charged to the person whose phone was about to die. Uber denies pricing on battery data. But the data exists, the gap showed up, and nothing currently stops a company from using it.
Airlines are leaning into the same logic out loud. Delta has said it uses AI to set prices on about 3 percent of its domestic flights and wants that figure at 20 percent by the end of 2025, according to PYMNTS. Delta President Glen Hauenstein described the goal plainly: “We will have a price that’s available on that flight, on that time, to you, the individual.” A fare built for you specifically is the airline’s best guess at your ceiling.
James framed the stakes in terms of who gets profiled. “When this bill becomes law, shoppers will be able to trust that the price they are paying is a fair price, not one dictated by their web browsing history, income, race, or zip code,” she said. Assemblymember Emérita Torres, the Assembly sponsor, was blunter: “Surveillance pricing is not about offering consumers a better deal, it is about exploiting our personal data to maximize corporate profits.” Senate sponsor Rachel May framed it as a question: “New Yorkers shouldn’t have to wonder if the price they see is based on who they are instead of what they’re buying.”
Your CVS ExtraCare card is safe. The bill, per the official Senate text, leaves ordinary discounts fully intact. Loyalty and rewards programs, coupons, flash sales, bulk and subscription pricing, price matching, end-of-season markdowns, and class-based promotions for veterans, seniors, teachers, and active-duty service members are all explicitly allowed, as long as they are offered on clear, uniform terms. What it bans is the invisible version: a price reverse-engineered from a secret profile of you. There is also a carve-out so ride-share and delivery apps can still calculate fares from actual mileage and trip duration.
New York is not first here, which is part of why this passed. Earlier in 2026, Maryland and Connecticut enacted their own bans, making New York the third state to act, per Consumer Reports. The state already required a warning label as of November 10, 2025: under New York’s Algorithmic Pricing Disclosure Act, any company setting a price with an algorithm fed by your personal data has to post the words “THIS PRICE WAS SET BY AN ALGORITHM USING YOUR PERSONAL DATA,” with civil penalties up to $1,000 per violation enforced by the Attorney General, according to law firm Duane Morris. The One Fair Price Act goes a step further: instead of just making companies confess, it bans the practice outright. Enforcement again runs through the Office of the Attorney General, which can sue for penalties and restitution, and the bill drew a coalition spanning the AFL-CIO, the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union, the United Food and Commercial Workers, and AARP, per the AG’s office.
One gap remains. Consumer Reports notes the version that passed had its private right of action stripped out, meaning you personally could not sue a company that surveillance-priced you, only the Attorney General could. The group is urging Hochul to “stand with New Yorkers and push to strengthen protections, rather than diminish them,” and add that power back. That’s now up to Hochul.
If you think a price you saw was set by a profile of you and not by the product, the enforcer is the Attorney General’s office, and you can file a consumer complaint at ag.ny.gov. And if you want the stronger version of this law, the one that lets you sue on your own behalf, the person to tell is Governor Hochul, whose signature, or veto, is the last step before any of this binds a single retailer.
Featured image: Beyond My Ken / CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons
