The Federal Trade Commission is investigating how companies including Mastercard and JPMorgan Chase use AI and personal data for services that let firms set different prices for different people.
The FTC has issued orders seeking information from eight firms that offer so-called "surveillance pricing" products and services that incorporate data about consumers’ characteristics and behaviour.
The regulator says it wants to better understand the "opaque market" that sees algorithms and AI used along with personal information - such as location, demographics, credit history, and browsing or shopping history — to categorise people and set a targeted price for a product or service.
FTC chair Lina M Khan says: “Firms that harvest Americans’ personal data can put people’s privacy at risk. Now firms could be exploiting this vast trove of personal information to charge people higher prices.
“Americans deserve to know whether businesses are using detailed consumer data to deploy surveillance pricing, and the FTC’s inquiry will shed light on this shadowy ecosystem of pricing middlemen.”
The orders have been sent to Mastercard, Revionics, Bloomreach, JPMorgan Chase, Task Software, PROS, Accenture, and McKinsey & Co.
They request information on the types of surveillance pricing products and services that each company has produced; the data sources used; whom the products and services were offered to and what those customers planned to do with them; and the impacts on consumers and prices.
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