Today is Super Saturday, the last Saturday before Christmas.

It's predicted to be the second busiest shopping day of the year.

If you're going online to buy some last-minute gifts, there's a chance the price you'll pay

will be influenced by what's known as surveillance pricing.

That's the practice of some retailers to use the power of AI to sift all sorts of personal data

to set individualized prices online. Things like your age, gender, geographic location,

and even browsing history could change the price you pay. Allie Rogan spoke with Jay Stanley,

senior policy analyst for the speech, privacy, and technology project at the ACLU.

Thank you so much for joining us. So what is surveillance pricing and how does it work?

Surveillance pricing is basically when companies gather a huge amount of data about their individual customers.

And we're living in an era where more data is being collected

about us than ever before. Companies take that data and they use it to try to figure out

basically how to ring more money out of you when you buy things from them. What is your pain

point? What are you willing to pay? Questions like that. And there's a widespread experimentation

happening with that kind of pricing in a

number of business sectors today. So what are some examples of that? How are these companies using

the massive amounts of data that exist about all of us online to give us these? I've heard it

described as like personalized pricing.

I mean, right off the bat, there's a lot we don't know because, number one, they're going to claim trade secrets. Number two, they're using AI, which is very opaque in the first place.

Even the businesses may not understand what the logic of the AI they're using is.

But this first came into public attention when the president of Delta Airlines, speaking to investors,

said that they were planning on using AI to set an increasing proportion of their prices,

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