Pennsylvania HB 1942: An Act providing for prohibition on surveillance pricing; and imposing penalties.

Bill Text

PRINTER'S NO. 2451
THE GENERAL ASSEMBLY OF PENNSYLVANIA
HOUSE BILL
No. 1942
Session of
2025
INTRODUCED BY BURGOS, KINKEAD, GUZMAN, HILL-EVANS, RIVERA,
HOHENSTEIN, STEELE, BOROWSKI, HADDOCK, SANCHEZ, CEPEDA-
FREYTIZ, MERSKI, GALLAGHER, GREEN AND CIRESI,
OCTOBER 14, 2025
REFERRED TO COMMITTEE ON CONSUMER PROTECTION, TECHNOLOGY AND
UTILITIES, OCTOBER 16, 2025
AN ACT
Providing for prohibition on surveillance pricing; and imposing
penalties.
The General Assembly finds and declares as follows:
(1) A recent study documented how businesses are
aggressively and secretly engaging in surveillance of their
customers and secretly varying prices between customers or
groups accordingly. The study documented the following
surveillance-based pricing practices:
(i) Orbitz learned that Mac users typically spend
more money to stay at hotels and steered those users
toward different, sometimes costlier, travel options than
non-Mac users.
(ii) Hotel booking sites charged people in certain
zip codes more money to stay at hotels than people in
other zip codes across the country. In one example, a
person in the Bay area was charged by Hotels.com $80 more
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to stay in a New York City hotel than someone browsing
for the same room from Kansas City.
(iii) Staples.com charged people more for the same
stapler if they knew a person had fewer options such as
not being physically near a competitor.
(iv) Target charged people more for its products
when they were in a Target parking lot versus when they
were in another location because the company determined
people who were near a store entrance were willing to pay
more. As a result, prices spiked for a television, a
smart watch, a vacuum and a child car seat once consumers
had arrived in a store parking lot.
(v) Test preparation company The Princeton Review
charged customers more money when it found that they
lived in zip codes with large Asian populations.
(2) Corporate consultants have told clients that
surveillance-based pricing strategies "have become a
cornerstone of modern business strategy." Profit margins are
improved by two to seven percentage points when surveillance
pricing is implemented, according to McKinsey and Company. A
Yale study found surveillance-based pricing increased profits
for airlines by 4% to 5%.
(3) Other studies document that surveillance pricing
impacts lower-income people the most. A study of broadband
Internet offers to 1,100,000 residential addresses showed the
worst deals given to the poorest people. Areas with
discounted prices tended to have a higher average income than
areas that tended to see higher prices.
(4) Personalized or surveillance-based pricing
technologies could permit large grocery store chains to
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impose unfair and discriminatory prices on their customers
for basic food necessities in ways that might increase the
economic burdens of those already subject to discrimination
or economic hardships.
(5) Recent reports have raised the possibility that
publicly traded grocery store chains, including the dozens of
grocery brands under Kroger's corporate umbrella, are
concurrently installing facial recognition and other
biometric technologies and adopting electronic shelving
labels. Together, these technologies could allow grocery
retailers to distinguish between customers based on race,
gender, disability, distance traveled to the store, age and
electronically stored personal information in real time and
price food differently based on individualized profiling.
(6) Legislation is required to fairly and
compassionately restrain the deployment and use of unfair,
discriminatory, privacy-invading technologies that, if
deployed in ways contrary to the public interest and welfare,
will dramatically exacerbate gaps between wealthy and working
families to the unneeded benefit of the former and the
enduring, unjust harm of the latter.
The General Assembly of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania
hereby enacts as follows:
Section 1. Short title.
This act shall be known and may be cited as the Surveillance
Pricing Act.
Section 2. Definitions.
The following words and phrases when used in this act shall
have the meanings given to them in this section unless the
context clearly indicates otherwise:
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"Electronic surveillance technology." A technological method
or system of surveillance used to observe, monitor or collect
information related to a person, including the following:
(1) Actions, habits, race, religion, residence,
sexuality or preferences.
(2) Interests, including the individual's political,
personal or professional affiliation.
(3) Web-browsing history, purchase history, financial
circumstances or consumer behaviors.
(4) Personally identifiable information.
"Person." A natural person or an entity, including, but not