ICYMI: Hawley Exposes Predatory AI Surveillance Pricing, Consumer Data Harvesting in Subcommittee Hearing

ICYMI: Hawley Exposes Predatory AI Surveillance Pricing, Consumer Data Harvesting in Subcommittee Hearing

Wednesday, August 05, 2026

WASHINGTON - Yesterday, U.S. Senator Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), as Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Counterterrorism, held a hearing exposing the exploitative practices of AI surveillance pricing and consumer data harvesting used by large corporations to scam working Americans out of their hard-earned money.

Senator Hawley opened, "Hardly a day goes by in this town, without some booster of AI talking about how it's going to transform the American economy for the better, the question is whose betterment will this transformation lead to? … We're here today to talk about one of the effects of this AI boom: the partnership between the AI industry and some of the biggest corporations in America to effectively scam consumers out of every last dollar they have in order to buy products that they need and rely on … This is one of the biggest scams in American history. This marriage between the AI industry and these mega corporations, and they're trying to pull it off against every American consumer. AI surveillance pricing is the unholy trinity of everything Americans hate: spying on people, ripping them off, and taking away jobs."

"Earlier this year, there was a disturbing incident that played out on Twitter on X that shed some light, I think, on how airlines are using surveillance pricing in real time, right in front of us. I think I've got the relevant exchange over my shoulder here. You have an ex-user who, in April, this is April of this year, posted that he had seen a $230 price increase in one day when he was booking travel for a funeral on JetBlue. $230 price increase. Now, here's the interesting thing: JetBlue's own corporate account helpfully responded to him and instructed him to clear the cache and the cookies, or use an incognito window," Senator Hawley began.

"Now, Ms. Owens, you're familiar with this incident, I assume. Can you explain to us broadly what is what's going on here?" he asked Dr. Lindsay Owens, the President and CEO of Groundwork Collaborative, about airline surveillance pricing.

Dr. Owens responded, "This really simple tweet basically is a confession of two things. The first thing in asking the customer to clear their browser before purchasing flights, you know that the company is tracking your browser history. The second thing we know is that they are using the data that they collect in their pricing decisions, and in this case, adversely, the price is going to be higher for this individual based on their browsing history. But I also think this is such an important example because it shows that surveillance pricing isn't just about things like income. This is about desperation. This individual is trying to get to the funeral. He needs this ticket urgently. He wants to attend, and that can be weaponized against consumers. This isn't about the rising jet fuel prices. That's not what's going into an end to their pricing decision. Desperation is driving this decision."

Senator Hawley continued, "Let me just ask you, Dr. Owens. I think it's pretty clear. But what's the motive here? I mean, what is JetBlue's motive?"

Laying down the hammer, she answered, "This is about profit. The data that powers the surveillance pricing engine is estimated to be a $700 billion industry by 2030."

"What other kinds of information do these companies have that they can use to set these personalized, scam, I would say, prices?" Hawley questioned.

"Unfortunately for consumers, the answer is, increasingly, nearly everything. It's your location data, it's behavioral data, what you buy, what you don't buy, what you keep in your cart, it's demographic data. If you login with a loyalty program to fly, they know how many people are in your family, whether you have kids, where you go frequently. And as we know, with AI, as companies build enterprise agents, people often start conversing with these companies, and they have the information that you tell them," Dr. Owens testified.

Senator Hawley exposed that AI surveillance pricing costs the average American family an additional $1,200 per year, stating, "Your initiative, your organization, the Groundwork Collaborative, issued an expose on Instacart earlier this year. What your findings betray and put onto the record is just incredible. Your report exposes on Instacart's charging different shoppers different prices for the same groceries at the same time, and the amount of money that we're talking about here is really extraordinary. Your report found that the price swings for an average family could end up being in the neighborhood of $1,200 per year.$1,200 per year-that is a lot of money. Tell us about what you found in your report and why it's so significant."

"We uncovered a vast experiment that Instacart was running on millions of Americans while they shop for groceries. What we found is that different shoppers were being offered different prices for the exact same set of items at the exact same time at the exact same pickup location. This wasn't an occasionally finding. More than three-quarters of the items in our test grocery basket were found to be offered at different prices, sometimes as many as five prices per item. Sometimes the price difference was as much as 23% for a simple carton of eggs," Dr. Owens said.

Senator Hawley turned to Robert Hedges, Former Chief Data Officer at Visa and Digital Fellow at MIT, "Let's talk a little bit about the role that the credit cards play in this … You are Visa's Former Chief Data officer. Talk to us a little bit about what you know about what the industry, what kind of information the industry gathers, and I want to zero you in on one thing in particular. JetBlue works reportedly with one of your former competitors, Mastercard, to make assumptions and draw profiles about its customers, about JetBlue's customers, and they use categories like confident, or satisfied, or focused, or in love with JetBlue. This Mastercard subsidiary then flags if a JetBlue customer is likely to pay an above-average fare. This seems extraordinary.Tell us about what you have learned about what this subset of at least some of the credit card industry is doing to participate in surveillance pricing."

Mr. Hedges responded, "The subsidiary that Mastercard is using is a company called Dynamic Yield. One of the specialties of what Dynamic Yield does is calculate willingness to pay, and so there's a whole set of data that's collected to inform willingness to pay … In the airline case, where you really travel? When did you book the ticket? Have you already booked the hotel? Do you have friends or neighbors or relatives in the area? How long ago was the trip organized? All those using the airline example, all those things will influence the score and willingness to pay."

Hawley asked Z. John Zhang, a marketing professor at the University of Pennsylvania, "The problem with this surveillance pricing is that it seems to say there's going to be a different rule for every single person, and the corporations have all the information. We have none of it. The asymmetry is astounding. They know everything there is to know. I have basically no ability to set the price. They've got all of the information. Doesn't that doesn't there seem to be something that is fundamentally wrong with that?"

Dr. Zhang defended surveillance pricing, stating, "I would totally agree with you that there has to be a boundary. The boundary probably most likely is in the way you collect information, process information, and use the information, but not in a way that you would actually have a multiple price points for the product … I think at this point, somehow that our understanding is that anytime you use personalized pricing, not only you're going to make the price variable across the customers, also that indeed the prices always go high. I don't believe that's the case. The fact that the prices are variable, they are already there already, and so you don't need the AI to do all that. And the firms do actually change pricing in so many different ways, but in terms of whether prices always go up, I think that probably is not the case."

Senator Hawley pressed, "But isn't the goal of surveillance pricing always to maximize profit? … In this case, the consumers have no protections. They've got no protections. The firm has all of the information. The corporation's got all of the power. I have no power to set the price. The only thing I can do is hope and beg that maybe at 2 A.M. in the morning, when my child is running 102 degree fever and I desperately need Tylenol, that maybe if Walmart Plus is charging me 30 bucks for it, gee, if I can drive to an open CVS, maybe I'll get lucky. I mean, I'm just at their mercy, right? That just seems fundamentally wrong to me, and I think it seems fundamentally wrong to most Americans, which is why we're here today."

Senator Hawley concluded, "What I'm really concerned about is time after time after time, it's working people who are going to be paying more, who are going to be forced to pay more, and frankly, the needy, because the whole point here is to maximize the profit of these already wildly profitable corporations … And we need to give consumers and working people and families in this country rights against this kind of surveillance and exploitation. If we don't do that, the basic foundations, the moral foundations of our economy and of our country will be devastatingly eroded. And you see it already. This is why people don't trust anything. They don't trust any institution. They certainly don't trust any of these companies we've talked about today. Nor should they, because they're being exploited constantly, and it is this body's job to do something about that. So we need to stand up and say we're going to protect the American people. We're going to give them rights. We're going to preserve that basic moral foundation that makes our economy and our country more broadly work, and that we agree on together. So it makes us Americans. It's done us pretty good for the last 250 years. I think maybe we ought to preserve it."

Watch the full hearing here.

Issues