Is your phone or browser raising prices for you in particular?

We continue to follow news this week.

The Federal Trade Commission is investigating what some are calling surveillance pricing where you might get charged more or less than other people because your personal data

Where you are where you've been clues about your interests and lifestyle the FTC researchers have asked third-party

companies with this data from MasterCard to Chase Bank to McKinsey Consulting for

Access, Marketplace's Samantha Field has more.

If you've ever used Uber or Lyft, you've probably noticed how the same trip can be much more expensive

just from one hour to the next.

Brett House at Columbia Business School says that's dynamic pricing when companies

change the price for all customers based on demand.

Surveillance pricing goes a step further to collect not only information on the general market but on the specific consumer and their preferences.

Information like where you live, how much you make, where you shop.

Zephyr teach out at Fordham Law School says there's lots of

anecdotal evidence that this is happening say with airfare but the truth is

that what we don't know about surveillance pricing could fill an ocean and right now a lot of

consumers are in a state of rational paranoia.

They know their data is being collected and shared and that prices are changing but they don't

know if those two things are connected. The reason we're doing this is because we

don't know a lot. Douglas Ferrer at the FTC says the Commission's hoping to

learn what kinds of data and technology

companies are using and how they're using it to set prices.

Do we want to live in a world where everyone pays a different price because businesses know everything about you.

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