Seattle, Washington – The Seattle City Council today passed the Fair Pricing and Transparency Act (CB 121267), groundbreaking legislation supported by Consumer Reports that would prohibit personalized pricing in the sale of groceries. Consumer Reports provided technical assistance to the Mayor’s office throughout the policy development process, testified, and recently submitted a letter in support of the legislation. The bill now heads to Mayor Wilson for her signature. 

This bill, which is the first of its kind to pass at the city level, would prohibit the use of a consumer’s personal data to change the price they see for groceries and other essential items. This includes, for example, data about a consumer’s web-browsing history, their realtime location, inferences about their income, family size, health conditions, and more. The bill also permits a vast array of discounting practices while requiring increased transparency around discounts and placing some limitations on how consumers can be profiled.

“Nobody should pay more for basic necessities because a data broker is quietly collecting information about what they’re searching for online, what they hover over, what their income is, or where they go,” said Grace Gedye, senior policy analyst at Consumer Reports. “The price you see shouldn’t be different based on who you are. Mayor Wilson and the City Council have made Seattle a leader on protecting shoppers from unfair grocery pricing tactics with this bill. We commend this work.”

Background:

Other states have taken action to sign bills into law to ban the practice of surveillance pricing, including Maryland, Connecticut and New Jersey. 

In May 2025, Consumer Reports investigated Kroger’s consumer data practices and found that they were collecting vast data profiles for individual shoppers, with inferences about their income, family size, education level, gender, and more. One shopper who requested their data under a state privacy law received a 62-page profile.

In December 2025, CR, along with partners Groundwork Collaborative and More Perfect Union, published an investigation into Instacart’s pricing tactics. CR had nearly 400 consumers shop for the same basket of goods at the same time. Analysis of the shopping data found that consumers were quoted different prices for the same products from the same store at the same time. The investigation found that Instacart’s algorithmic pricing experiments could result in price differences as high as 23% for certain products and could cost families more than $1,200 a year at checkout. Soon after, Instacart announced in a company blog post that it would end the program that resulted in different shoppers being shown different ​prices for groceries on its platform. However, Instacart told CR that it would still allow its partners—grocery retailers and food brands—to test different types of promotions and discounts on their customers through the platform.

CR’s most recent investigation of Uber and Lyft’s AI-driven pricing tactics found that the companies routinely charge different customers significantly different prices for the same rides ordered at roughly the same time. CR also found that both apps regularly advertised supposed discounts off what appeared to be inflated original prices. (Note: CR defines “same rides” as trips from the same starting point to the same destination priced within minutes—and often seconds—of one another.)

Additional information on Consumer Reports’ campaign to Make the Price Right can be found here.

Contact: cyrus.rassool@consumer.org

Issues

Tech & Privacy

Expert

Grace Gedye

Policy Analyst