WIRED spotlights Lindsay Owens’s book on surveillance pricing and AI-driven shopping

WIRED has published an interview with Lindsay Owens, CEO of Groundwork Collaborative and a former economic policy adviser to Senator Elizabeth Warren, tied to her new book Gouged. Owens describes “surveillance pricing” as personalized pricing based on information about an individual rather than market conditions or demographic groups. She argues generative AI could deepen those tactics, pointing to Walmart’s reported Sparky cart totals as an early warning sign. Owens says shoppers can sometimes compare prices across logged-in and logged-out sessions, apps, websites, stores, and even regions, though she argues consumers should not have to game the system this way. She also says dozens of state bills targeting surveillance and algorithmic pricing have been introduced this year, with some enacted in Connecticut, New Jersey, and Maryland.