The FTC is gathering information on surveillance pricing products and services

Ellie Ramirez-Camara -

The US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has requested that Mastercard, Revionics, Bloomreach, JPMorgan Chase, Task Software, PROS, Accenture, and McKinsey & Co. provide information on their advertised surveillance pricing products and services. The orders issued by the FTC are part of an effort by the regulator to understand how these practices could affect customer privacy and protection measures, as well as market competition. The orders for information are not intended as a law enforcement process, but simply as an attempt to understand how companies that advertise surveillance pricing products and services are using AI and other technologies, combined with other customer information, to deliver targeted pricing.

In particular, the FTC is looking for information on the following four areas:

  • The types of products and services these companies offer, including third-party licensing, and information on the technical implementations and intended uses;
  • the data sources for each product, including data collection methods, the platforms used to collect them, and whether the collection is performed directly by the company or a third party;
  • customers that the companies have reached offering their products and services, how these customers plan on using the products and services; and
  • the potential impact of the products and services on surveilled customers, including how targeted pricing affects individual customers.

By gathering this information, the FTC aims to understand how surveillance pricing products and services in the market work, but more importantly, whether they pose a risk to consumers' privacy. How much and what kind of information the companies are collecting to power their services is nothing short of a mystery, and as FTC Chair Lina M. Khan stated, "Americans deserve to know whether businesses are using detailed consumer data to deploy surveillance pricing, and the FTC’s inquiry will shed light on this shadowy ecosystem of pricing middlemen."