How to Beat Surveillance Pricing Before It Bleeds You Dry

You mentioned earlier that software innovations are a major driver of these changes. Do you see generative AI as exacerbating existing issues?

Absolutely. Agentic commerce is not ubiquitous quite yet. We're in the early stages, but the early warning signs are flashing. Walmart says Sparky cart totals are 35 percent higher than non-Sparky cart totals. These new technologies are supercharging age-old impulses to upsell you, to get you to purchase an add-on, to make sure you leave with the item instead of coming back tomorrow.

AI agents are often marketed as tools that can help automate your online shopping decisions. How else could this kind of outsourcing of decisionmaking backfire for consumers?

We're at an inflection point. We can quickly move to regulate this and require agents to work in consumers' interests, as other agents in our economy work in consumers' interests.

Your realtor has to work on your behalf. Your lawyer has a best-interest standard or a fiduciary standard even in some cases.

The cost of living and affordability crisis is making life hard for Americans. These new technologies are making consuming and shopping exhausting. Once you imagine layering in fighting off a snake oil salesman, then you realize consuming is about to be completely different.

In the US, do you see laws banning surveillance pricing happening primarily on the state level, or will federal decisionmakers get more involved?

It's a little of both, right now. I worked for Senator Warren as a staffer, and I just testified on behalf of [Senator] Josh Hawley on this issue. So, I think this issue is a nonpartisan one.

Obviously, federal momentum takes a long time; there's been more movement at the state level. We've seen dozens of pieces of legislation to crack down on surveillance and algorithmic pricing this year. Some of it has passed and been signed into law in states like Connecticut, New Jersey, and Maryland.

How can I beat surveillance pricing? What strategies can I try, even if it's a Sisyphean effort?

From the bottom of my heart, I do not believe it is every consumer's job to duck and dodge and bob and weave and beat the machine. There are some ways to fight back, like calling members of Congress. Look, I think raising your voice is important.

In addition, there are a handful of ways to try to get a better deal. The first is to change the way you comparison shop. You can't just comparison shop across brands; you have to compare within brands: logged in versus logged out, in the app versus on the website versus in the brick-and-mortar store. Maybe you also change geographies using a VPN? These are all ways to comparison shop the same item from the same company but in different modalities.

The second thing is they figure out how much they can overcharge us by experimenting on us. My organization exposed Instacart's massive experiment treating millions of Americans as guinea pigs without their knowledge in A/B tests. You can turn the experiment back on them. Call your friend. Ask them to fire up their app. See who gets a better deal. You can even have them purchase it, and Venmo each other. Sit next to your spouse, and both look at plane tickets.