đ Do Your Groceries Cost More? Could Be Surveillance Pricing
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Weâve gotten used to advertisements that follow us from web browsers, to smartphones, to televisions, to grocery stores. Modern tech promises efficiency, personalization, and better experiences. What Big Tech delivers instead is pervasive and ubiquitous surveillance, baked directly into the systems you rely upon for everyday chores.
Sure, you can shrug and consider your loss of privacy the cost of living in a connected world, but itâs worth taking a closer look at how the stakes are increasing. Tracking of your behavior can have a heavy impact on your wallet and even your business.
Prices now change routinely based on who you are. Smartphones are reporting on you thousands of times a day. Tracking techniques once considered unacceptable are quietly making a comeback.
As the year 2025 ends, we highlight a few ways that surveillance is creeping back into ordinary life. Read our breakdown below and, if you want to better understand surveillance and what you can do about it, our Ivy Cyber Masterclass starts January 4 and thereâs still plenty of time to sign up.
đď¸ Surveillance Pricing Makes You Pay More
If your grocery bill feels unpredictable lately, it might not just be inflation or even shrinkflation. It might be your grocery app colluding with a cloud server to alter prices in the upward direction.
A major investigation by Consumer Reports and Groundwork Collaborative found that Instacart has been quietly running AI-driven pricing experiments that show different prices to different shoppers for the exact same items. Tests involving hundreds of simultaneous Instacart shoppers found that the price of items could differ by as much as 23% per item from one customer to the next. Sometimes the difference was just a few cents. Other times it was two dollars or more.
âAbout three-quarters of the products [Consumer Reports] checked were offered at different prices to different customers. Some products were offered at as many as five different prices, and price variations for the same products ranged from as little as 7 cents to $2.56 per item.â
Instacart describes this as routine experimentation and says shoppers are not meaningfully harmed. But thereâs a catch: according to the companyâs own disclosures, shoppers werenât told they were part of these experiments at all. Identical groceries at the same store, at the same time, were priced differently for different people. In one example, the same cart of groceries ranged by nearly ten dollars depending on the account viewing it. Only a small fraction of shoppers ever saw the lowest price.
Experts warn this kind of variation by retailers is sliding from âdynamic pricingâ into a more troubling practice â âsurveillance pricing.â Thatâs when companies use personal data and behavioral signals to guess how much youâre willing to pay, then quietly charge you that amount.
Shopping history, device type, location, loyalty, and even how you browse can become factors in the price you pay. The goal is not fairness or efficiency. Instead, itâs about extracting the maximum possible price from each individual shopper and discriminating via app, click, and swipe.
Instacart says it has paused some of these experiments after the investigation, but the bigger issue remains. Grocery shopping is an essential activity for nearly everyone. When food prices become âpersonalizedâ and pricing becomes opaque and confusing, consumers lose the ability to compare, budget, or trust the marketplace.
An algorithm that costs you money because âyou can handle itâ sounds less like innovation and more like a shakedown. Luckily, we can teach you some strategies to opt out of this clandestine price discrimination. đ¸
đą Your iPhone Is Constantly Phoning Home
Apple has spent years telling us that privacy is a core feature of the iPhone. The company advertises loudly that âwhat happens on your iPhone stays on your iPhone.â That promise took a hit this month after cybersecurity researchers observed an iPhone sending more than 3,400 outbound tracking signals in a single hour under controlled testing conditions. This wasnât an edge case or a malware infection. It was a stock iPhone doing what it always does â day in, day out.
âThese âtracking callsâ arenât mere pings; they transmit identifiers, location data, and behavioral patterns, often without explicit user consent. This discovery aligns with ongoing concerns about how mobile devices, despite their fortified exteriors, leak data like sieves.â
Even more unsettling, many of these connections continued while the phone appeared idle, with the screen off and no apps in use.
Apple will point to features like App Tracking Transparency and privacy labels as a protection it provides for customers. But thereâs a yawning gap between marketing and reality. App permissions wonât stop these data flows, which are baked into the iOS operating systemâs design.
We should stop pretending modern smartphones are quiet, passive devices. They are active participants in data ecosystems that never sleep. Your iPhone isnât spying on you in the classic sense of a peeping Tom. Itâs doing something more mundane and arguably more dangerous â building a digital version of you for future analysis. If the past is any guide, thatâs a frightening prospect. đŹ
đď¸ Google Exhumes User Fingerprints & Calls It Progress
Google has quietly decided to bring back user fingerprinting, a form of tracking it once publicly condemned. Under updated advertising policies, the Big Tech company will once again allow advertisers to identify users by correlating information like IP address, browser configuration, device characteristics, and other hard-to-change traits to create a unique identifier that follows users around the web.
This is not a new technique. Itâs one of the oldest and most controversial forms of online tracking, notorious precisely because users cannot easily see it, block it, or opt out.
For a long time, fingerprinting was framed as crossing a line even Google said should not be crossed. In 2019, the company explicitly argued that fingerprinting subverts user choice and is wrong. Now, facing the slow death of third-party cookies and pressure from advertisers, Google is reversing course and claiming that new privacy-enhancing technologies somehow make fingerprinting acceptable again.
The consequences of this rollback will not be immediate. This will play out throughout 2026 as fingerprinting quietly spreads across platforms and devices under the banner of compliance and innovation. Regulators will chase Google over the change, and UK's Information Commissionerâs Office (ICO) has already called the company âirresponsibleâ for the backslide:
âBusinesses do not have free rein to use fingerprinting as they please. Like all advertising technology, it must be lawfully and transparently deployed⌠[fingerprinting] is not a fair means of tracking users online because it is likely to reduce peopleâs choice and control over how their information is collected.â
Whatâs an ordinary user to do? Luckily, you can use our PrivacySafe Search to sidestep Googleâs search engine. That wonât protect you completely, but we can teach you other methods of blocking this advertising surveillance in our classes. đ
đĽ Start the New Year Strong. Enroll in Our Jan 4 Class!
Make it a New Yearâs resolution to reduce your exposure to surveillance in your neighborhood, at your keyboard, and on your phone.
Our Masterclass on Surveillance & Terrorism flips the script on spying and empowers you instead. For the holiday season, this extensive online course is 50% off.
Learn in online classes led by our surveillance detection expert and CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou as well as Sean OâBrien, digital self-defense guru and founder of Yale Privacy Lab. The class starts January 4 and features three live sessions as well as a ton of material focused on real-world privacy and security strategies you wonât get from social media influencers.
Best of all, we run everything on our own privacy-respecting apps and services. Let us help you break free from surveillance in 2026. đ
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