New NDP Leader Avi Lewis has set his sights on bringing an end to the practice of surveillance pricing, calling it a “crystal clear example of why we desperately need government guardrails to protect us from the triple threat of Big Tech, AI and corporate monopolies that dominate every sector of our economy.” During a press conference in Ottawa flanked by his MPs, Lewis called on the Carney government to enact a ban “before it becomes a predatory new normal in Canadian life.”
Surveillance pricing is when a company uses personal data — geolocation, device type, browsing history, social media activity — to create an individualized price for someone, with the aim of determining the maximum amount a person is willing to pay for something based on their individual circumstances. The objective of surveillance pricing isn’t necessarily to individualize prices for people, but to extract the most amount of money a person is willing to pay.
If that seems invasive, it’s because it is. Surveillance pricing is predicated on the ability to take all sorts of your personal data that you did not openly consent to being used against you to get the maximum price for a company charging you for a good or service.
If, for example, a retailer knows you’re looking at an item from within the parking lot, then they can charge you more for it using the logic that if you’ve already travelled all the way to the store and are looking up the item in the parking lot, so chances are you’d be willing to pay more for an item compared to someone who still needs to actually make their way to the store.
This isn’t a hypothetical scenario. In 2019, investigative journalists at Kare 11 News in Minnesota found that the Target app would charge significantly higher prices when someone was using the app in a Target parking lot than if the user was using the app somewhere else.
More recently in 2025, a joint investigation in the US by Consumer Reports and Groundwork Collaborative revealed that the grocery store app Instacart was pricing the same item from the same store as much as 23 per cent higher between different customers.
It’s clear why consumers would dislike the notion of surveillance pricing. In addition to being invasive, nobody likes paying more for something than someone else would, and you often don’t even know that it’s happening. There is also a real worry that surveillance pricing can lead to discriminatory practices such as charging consumers more based on their race or gender, or charging more for medicine to someone who’s sick and desperate for relief than to someone just preparing for flu season.
It is difficult to discern how widespread or commonplace the practice of surveillance pricing is in Canada, but we do know that the notion of using one’s data to set an individualized price isn’t new and now that we are in the age of advanced machine learning and AI, the system that underpins surveillance pricing is effectively on overdrive.
Surveillance pricing is different from the kind of dynamic pricing people have experienced in the past, such as when airlines and hotels would charge more for tickets and rooms during peak travel times. In a system of dynamic pricing, when the price of a plane ticket or hotel room goes up because it’s March break or over the Christmas holiday, it gets equally more expensive for everybody.
Contrast that to an airline or a hotel charging you more because they know through your web browsing history and online activity that you have to go to a funeral, so you’d be willing to pay more in order to properly mourn your loss.
Back in the fall of 2024, the head of the Federal Trade Commission, Lina Khan, warned that airlines could soon use AI to determine whether or not someone needed a flight in order to attend a funeral. Khan used the example of an airline charging more money for a ticket “because the company knows that they just had a death in the family and need to fly across the country.” Khan was written off at the time by her corporate critics as fearmongering, but her warning proved to be rather prescient.
In a now deleted social media post, American airline JetBlue responded to someone complaining about a $230 price increase in one day, noting they were merely trying to make it to a funeral, by telling the person to “Try clearing your cache and cookies, or booking with an incognito window. We’re sorry for your loss.”
JetBlue maintained the response on social media was written in error and that the airline doesn’t use personalized information or cached data on their website or mobile app. JetBlue’s response strains credulity, especially when they did not respond to any of Gizmodo’s follow-up questions.
Going after surveillance pricing is both good politics and good policy and Lewis and the NDP are smart to pursue it.
On the policy front, it’s a substantive way to help people with affordability while correcting for an inherently unfair practice. On the political front, it’s a really easy way to expose politicians who don’t actually have the interest of Canadian consumers as their top of mind.
The perfect example of this is Ontario Premier Doug Ford, who when asked about his thoughts on surveillance pricing said he was against banning it because he believes in free-market capitalism. But extracting data from people through a near-constant state of surveillance against our will — and then coming up with individualized pricing based on that — is not free and fair competition, it is preying on consumers, to the benefit of very large corporations.
While outright bans are difficult to enforce, there is no question that we need our laws to catch up to the dystopian reality consumers are forced to live in. Additionally, given that the entire process of surveillance pricing is behind a black box of sorts — we don’t know exactly what data of ours is being gathered, how it’s being obtained and how it’s used to set a price — it can be difficult to mount a more precise policy or legislative response than advocating for an outright ban on the practice altogether.
We don’t only have to respond to things with a policy fix after things have been really, really bad for a while. We can, in fact, try to get ahead of the issues that we can very clearly see coming. We just need more people to listen to Avi Lewis and the NDP.