New York's legislature has passed the One Fair Price Act, a bill that would bar retailers from using shoppers' personal data to charge them individualized prices, and now the measure sits on Governor Kathy Hochul's desk with a December 31 signing deadline. If Hochul puts pen to paper, New York would become the third state, after Maryland and Connecticut, to crack down on what critics call surveillance pricing.
The bill cleared both the state Senate and Assembly, as The U.S. Sun reported, setting up a direct confrontation between Albany and major retailers, including Walmart and Kroger, that have invested heavily in digital shelf technology. Grocery stores, business groups, and delivery platform Instacart have lobbied against the legislation, warning it will drive prices higher for consumers.
The question now is whether Hochul will sign it. She has not publicly tipped her hand.
Surveillance pricing is not the same as a surge fare on a rideshare app or a hotel jacking rates on New Year's Eve. Those are dynamic pricing, adjustments based on broad market conditions like supply, demand, and time of day. The One Fair Price Act would still permit dynamic pricing, provided companies disclose it.
What the bill targets is more specific and more personal. Surveillance pricing uses a shopper's individual data, purchase history, browsing habits, location, income level, device brand, even zip code, to set a price tailored to that particular buyer. Two people standing in the same aisle, looking at the same box of cereal, could see two different price tags. One pays more because an algorithm decided she would.
Lindsay Owens, author of Gouged: The End of a Fair Price, framed the issue bluntly in a New York Post report:
"Surveillance pricing is the intersection of two things Americans hate: being spied on and being overcharged."
Owens also argued that the burden should not fall on consumers to outwit the algorithm:
"I feel very strongly that it should not be the consumer's job to duck and dodge and bob and weave to beat the machine. I think policymakers have to step in, set the rules of the road and restore fair pricing practices in this country."
That sentiment clearly resonated in Albany. The New York Post reported that state legislators passed the One Fair Price Act on June 4, banning businesses from setting individualized prices based on consumers' personal information.
New York already took a swing at this issue once. The state's Algorithmic Pricing Disclosure Act took effect in November 2025. That law allowed surveillance pricing, it just required companies to tell shoppers about it with a notice along the lines of "This price was set by an algorithm using your personal data."
The legislature apparently decided disclosure was not enough. The One Fair Price Act goes further: it bans the practice outright. Companies can still adjust prices based on market-wide conditions, but they cannot mine a customer's personal profile to charge her a premium her neighbor does not pay.
Under the new bill, any company that does use dynamic pricing must "clearly and conspicuously" disclose how often prices may change and what conditions factor into those changes. The shift from "tell people you're doing it" to "stop doing it" happened in a matter of months, a speed that suggests Albany lawmakers heard from constituents who were not satisfied with a disclaimer.
The legislative push has not been limited to New York. Walmart's digital price tag rollout has already drawn resistance from unions and lawmakers in multiple states, reflecting broader anxiety about how the technology could be used.
Tangled up in the surveillance pricing debate is a separate battle over electronic shelf labels, the digital price tags that retailers like Walmart and Kroger have installed in stores. These labels can change prices remotely and instantly, replacing the old method of printing and swapping paper tags by hand.
Retailers say the labels are a convenience tool, nothing more. They argue that the traditional method of changing price tags by hand takes hours, and digital labels simply speed up a mundane task. But critics see the technology as the infrastructure that makes surveillance pricing possible. If a store can change its prices in real time, the temptation to tailor those changes to individual shoppers grows.
New York's legislature split on this point. A separate bill that would have restricted electronic price tags passed the state Senate but stalled in the Assembly, which declined to vote on it. The One Fair Price Act, which addresses the pricing practice itself rather than the hardware, made it through both chambers.
That split matters. It suggests legislators were willing to regulate the behavior but not the tool, a distinction retailers will likely seize on as they lobby Hochul. Similar fights have erupted elsewhere, with New Jersey weighing restrictions on digital shelf labels in its own grocery stores.
New York is not moving in isolation. Maryland is set to become the first state to formally ban surveillance pricing in grocery stores through its Protection from Predatory Pricing Act, which Governor Wes Moore has pledged to sign. Fox News reported that the Maryland law would take effect October 1, 2026, requiring stores to keep prices fixed for at least one full business day and prohibiting the use of surveillance data, shopping history, ethnicity, or income to set different prices for different customers at the same time.
Connecticut has also taken action, though the details of its law are less widely reported. California, Colorado, Illinois, and New Jersey are among the states exploring similar legislation, according to Fox News, a signal that this is not a coastal quirk but a national trend building from the states up.
The Maryland debate surfaced one detail that should give every shopper pause. One Kroger customer in Oregon submitted a data request and received a 62-page profile in return. Most of the inferences in that profile were wrong. The company had built a dossier on the shopper, and could not even get it right.
That anecdote captures the core problem. Retailers are collecting vast amounts of personal data, feeding it into pricing algorithms, and the systems are not even accurate. Consumers are being profiled and potentially overcharged based on flawed information they never consented to share for that purpose.
Grocery stores, business groups, and Instacart have warned that bills like the One Fair Price Act will lead to price increases for Americans. The argument is familiar: regulate us and we will pass the cost along. It is the same logic deployed against virtually every consumer protection measure in modern memory.
But the argument deserves scrutiny. If surveillance pricing allows a retailer to charge one customer more than another for the same product based on personal data, banning the practice does not raise the cost of goods. It raises the floor for customers who were being charged less while eliminating the premium extracted from those who were being charged more. The net effect on the retailer's revenue depends on how aggressively it was using the practice, information companies have not volunteered.
Retailers have also pushed back on the electronic shelf label issue specifically, insisting the technology is about operational efficiency. That may be true in many cases. But the technology and the pricing practice are not easily separated when the same companies deploying digital tags are also investing in algorithmic pricing systems. Legislative pushback across seven states suggests lawmakers are not buying the efficiency-only argument.
Governor Hochul faces a straightforward choice. She can sign the One Fair Price Act and make New York the third state to ban surveillance pricing, or she can let the deadline pass and leave the weaker disclosure-only law as the state's sole protection.
The political incentives cut in both directions. Signing the bill aligns her with consumer advocates and a bipartisan appetite for reining in corporate data practices. Vetoing it, or quietly letting it die, would please the retail and tech lobbies that have spent heavily to oppose these measures.
The broader context is hard to ignore. Across the country, state attorneys general have taken aim at algorithmic pricing practices in retail, and the political ground is shifting beneath companies that once operated with little oversight in this space.
What remains unknown is telling. The One Fair Price Act's specific penalties and enforcement mechanisms have not been widely reported. Without teeth, even a signed bill could amount to little more than a press release. Maryland's law has already drawn criticism for exempting loyalty programs and including weak enforcement provisions. New York's legislature would be wise to learn from that example, assuming the governor gives them the chance.
Americans do not need a 62-page data profile to know when they are getting a raw deal. They just need a government willing to say so out loud.