To Those who have Nothing to Hide

Various hotel booking websites were found to display significantly higher prices to individuals in the San Francisco Bay Area than others. This is no coincidence: it is a practice known as surveillance pricing, and it’s catching on like fire in the travel and retail sectors. Surveillance pricing is the practice of gathering excessive information about customers to charge them personalized prices, often the maximum price they are predicted to pay. Surveillance pricing doesn’t happen only on travel websites, it’s coming to grocery and retail stores near you. Your cost of living will increase due to surveillance pricing.

Identity theft is at an all-time high and continues to rise. Fuelling the flame are data breaches from companies holding your sensitive information, making it easier than ever for fraudsters to steal your money. Many of these data collectors never told you they were recording all of that information, or if they did, they buried it in a word salad terms of service agreement, holding you hostage from the service unless you accepted. An example of this would be rental car companies that require a scan of your driver’s license that is then uploaded to the cloud and stored potentially indefinitely (a driver’s license is required to drive the car of course, but why is a cloud upload of your driver’s license required?). The biggest company providing that cloud and identity verification service had their entire database of more than 153 million driver’s licenses breached. To put that into perspective, there were about 240,000,000 licensed drivers in the United States in 2024 [1]. That’s 63.75% of all U.S. driver’s licenses, and 44.6% of the United States population on September 1st 2026 [2]. All you get is some measly credit monitoring for a few years, then you’re on your own.

Outside of illegal data breaches, your data is being sold and traded—legally, by the way—by data brokers. Are you comfortable knowing that anyone can buy from them an extensive dossier on you? The digital equivalent of those Manila folders you see in Hollywood spy movies with a paper-clipped photograph of the person attached. Whoever pays will know not only basic details such as where you live and what you do for work, but potentially granular details like, say, your habit of grabbing a large iced coffee on the way to work at the Dunkin’ Donuts 3.8 miles away from home, usually ordered using the app right before you get out of the house. Lives have already been lost due to data brokers.