Apr 22, 2026
In the past, when you booked a plane ticket or ordered food for delivery, you could be confident that the price you were paying or the deal you were offered were the same for every other customer.
But there have been more and more cases where this is not what's actually happening, as individuals are sometimes paying more (or less) for the same thing. On April 18, a JetBlue (NASDAQ: JBLU) customer took to X to express their frustration with the airline's pricing.
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"I love flying JetBlue but a $230 increase on a ticket after one day is crazy," the customer shared (1). "I'm just trying to make it to a funeral."
JetBlue's official X account replied with a controversial post that has since been deleted.
"Try clearing your cache and cookies or booking with an incognito window," JetBlue's account advised (2). "We're sorry for your loss."
That thread quickly went viral, with consumer advocates claiming the JetBlue response showed how airlines use your personal data to adjust pricing (3). JetBlue promptly deleted the reply post and called it an employee error, but as MarketWatch reports, "the internet flagged the response as a quiet admission of surveillance pricing."
A JetBlue spokesperson has since apologized for the error in an email to MarketWatch, saying the airline's fares "are not determined by cached data or other personal information."
By April 22, a post on X from Reclaim The Net — which features a screengrab of the original customer's post, as well as JetBlue's reply — had more than five million views and around 9,000 reposts.
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"Did JetBlue just admit to surveillance pricing?" Reclaim The Net pondered in its post.
Emerita Torres, a New York State Assemblymember, added her voice to this debate on X (4), claiming "Surveillance pricing is REAL and JetBlue just admitted it. Our web searches, mouse clicks and other forms of our personal data should not be used against us."
Greg Casar, a Congressman in Texas, also piped up on X (5), saying "You deserve to know if airlines are collecting your personal information and using it in any way to set prices."
This viral JetBlue story is the latest example in a slew of cases about surveillance pricing, and it's important for consumers to be aware of this practice and approach their purchases with a critical eye.
What is surveillance pricing?
Reuters (6) describes surveillance pricing as "a strategy where companies use a consumer's personal data — such as browsing history, location and shopping habits — to set individualized, algorithmic prices for products, as opposed to using standard, market-wide pricing."
In other words, the price you see (and pay) when shopping online may be different than someone else buying the same item from the same retailer.
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Business Insider conducted its own surveillance pricing experiment in March by having several employees order a McDonald's Big Mac meal with medium fries and a drink. These orders were made at the same time and were delivered via Uber Eats from the same McDonald's location to BI's office in Manhattan (7).
The result? None of the employees paid the same amount, with totals varying by 15 to 20 cents — the difference was reportedly found in the Uber service fee.
Retailers using artificial intelligence to assist with surveillance pricing now have the ability to "personalize consumer interactions to potentially deepen engagement, loyalty and customer delight," as reported by Forbes (8). But at a glance, it looks as though some of the prices we pay are now designed to benefit the retailer and no longer maintain a consistent sticker price that you would have paid in the past.
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What is being done about it?
Lindsay Owens, executive director of the think tank Groundwork Collaborative, shared her thoughts with MarketWatch (9), stating that "While JetBlue is now claiming the post was an 'error,' their only mistake was pulling back the curtain on their own deceptive pricing practices."
In December 2025, Groundwork Collaborative, Consumer Reports and More Perfect Union published a joint investigation into Instacart's pricing tactics, which discovered a price variation of up to 23% per item even when customers bought the same thing from the same store at the same time (10) — just like Business Insider discovered with the Big Macs.
Soon after the investigation went public, Instacart revealed it would end the program it was testing that gave customers different prices for the same item.
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Back in January 2025, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) released a surveillance pricing market study which found that personal details often are used to customize a price for the same good or service (11).
"Initial staff findings show that retailers frequently use people's personal information to set targeted, tailored prices for goods and services — from a person's location and demographics, down to their mouse movements on a webpage," said Linda M. Khan, who was the FTC chair at the time.
According to MarketWatch, some states have started taking action to try and stop surveillance pricing practices (12). The Protection from Predatory Pricing Act was just passed in Maryland's legislature and if it's signed into law, it will be the first state law specifically targeting surveillance pricing.
Furthermore, the state of New York now requires retailers to disclose when their prices are set using personal data, and Assemblymember Torres recently introduced the One Fair Price Act aimed at banning surveillance pricing in the state.
It's encouraging to see that some of those in power, along with the FTC, are taking surveillance pricing seriously, because even if the price differences aren't significant, small increases in cost per item can add up over a week, month, and year for a family.
Article Sources
We rely only on vetted sources and credible third-party reporting. For details, see our ethics and guidelines.
X (1),(2),(4),(5); MarketWatch (3),(9),(12); Reuters (6); Business Insider (7); Forbes (8); Consumer Reports (10); Federal Trade Commission (11)
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Joanna Sinclair is an engagement editor for Moneywise. She holds a B.A. in Professional Writing from York University and has been working in digital media for nearly two decades.
