By Bob Katzen
The House gave initial approval to a measure that would prohibit grocery stores from suggesting items or adjusting the prices of any item directly or indirectly based on the biometric data of individuals collected on the premises of a grocery store. Grocery stores would be allowed to use biometrics to allow customers to voluntarily verify their identity at the point of sale.
Violations by a grocery store would result in the store being fined for the amount of actual damages or $5,000, whichever is higher.
According to the website SupermarketNews.com, the biometrics can often involve the scanning of customer fingerprints or retinas.
“I filed this bill after learning that the largest grocery store chain in the U.S. is rolling out facial recognition technology and electronic price tags,” said sponsor Rep. Lindsay Sabadosa (D-Northampton). “These technologies, when put together, allow grocery stores to identify individual customers, their characteristics like race and gender and shopping habits. It has been shown time and time again that pricing algorithms are designed to take more money out of consumer pockets, and there is no place for this at the grocery store.”
In April at a public hearing, Woodrow Hartzog, a professor at Boston University’s School of Law, told the Committee on Advanced Information Technology, the Internet and Cybersecurity that surveillance pricing allows companies to figure out the highest price that customers are willing to pay.
“This disastrous practice leads to price gouging, discrimination by proxy, an inability to budget, data hoarding and the suffocating feeling that every choice you make while shopping is a trap,” said Hartzog. “This bill would prohibit food stores from using tools like facial recognition to charge people different prices and provide vital breathing room for customers, while still allowing for people to receive discounts.”
At the April hearing, Edgar Dworsky, a former assistant attorney general in consumer protection, questioned legislators’ concerns over surveillance pricing.
He suggested that supermarkets would likely use expanded personal data to offer targeted discounts to shoppers — rather than hitting them with steeper prices. “That would echo how supermarkets have used data gathered from loyalty programs to offer personalized discounts,” Dworsky wrote in written testimony.
“Your bill, however, would prevent stores from using any biometric data collected to offer lower prices to identified shoppers,” continued Dworsky, who is also founder of Consumer World. “That strikes me as anti-consumer. If you are not banning the collection of biometric data to start with, why not
simply prevent its use for the purpose of imposing higher than the standard or established price?”
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Massachusetts said that it supports the legislation but wants the protections to be expanded to all goods, not just food. “Prohibit surveillance-pricing generally, not just pricing driven by biometric surveillance,” the ACLU suggested in written testimony.
“Charging different customers different prices for the same product based on a personal profile is problematic whether that profile is derived from a person’s biometrics or other personal data.”