Seattle City Council votes to ban surveillance pricing in sale of groceries

Other states have taken action to sign bills into law to ban the practice of surveillance pricing, including Maryland, Connecticut and New Jersey.

In May 2025, Consumer Reports investigated Kroger’s consumer data practices and found that they were collecting vast data profiles for individual shoppers, with inferences about their income, family size, education level, gender, and more. One shopper who requested their data under a state privacy law received a 62-page profile.

In December 2025, CR, along with partners Groundwork Collaborative and More Perfect Union, published an investigation into Instacart’s pricing tactics. CR had nearly 400 consumers shop for the same basket of goods at the same time. Analysis of the shopping data found that consumers were quoted different prices for the same products from the same store at the same time. The investigation found that Instacart’s algorithmic pricing experiments could result in price differences as high as 23% for certain products and could cost families more than $1,200 a year at checkout. Soon after, Instacart announced in a company blog post that it would end the program that resulted in different shoppers being shown different ​prices for groceries on its platform. However, Instacart told CR that it would still allow its partners—grocery retailers and food brands—to test different types of promotions and discounts on their customers through the platform.

CR’s most recent investigation of Uber and Lyft’s AI-driven pricing tactics found that the companies routinely charge different customers significantly different prices for the same rides ordered at roughly the same time. CR also found that both apps regularly advertised supposed discounts off what appeared to be inflated original prices. (Note: CR defines “same rides” as trips from the same starting point to the same destination priced within minutes—and often seconds—of one another.)

Additional information on Consumer Reports’ campaign to Make the Price Right can be found here.