You may be the victim of surveillance pricing without even knowing it. But what does that even mean?
Surveillance pricing is the increasingly popular practice where some online retailers adjust prices for individuals based on data collected about that person, including browsing history, location, purchase history, and more. They often use third-party intermediaries to adjust those prices.
According to a preliminary report released by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) in early 2025, these third-party intermediaries can even track your mouse movements. But that doesn’t mean there’s nothing you can do about it.1
KEY TAKEAWAYS
The FTC found that companies collect personal information about online shoppers and use it to tweak the prices they pay for products.
Your browsing habits, geographic location, and more may influence the prices you pay.
You can protect yourself from surveillance pricing by clearing cookies and browsing incognito.
Consider using a virtual private network, or VPN.
Key Findings on Surveillance Pricing
The initial report from the FTC on surveillance pricing reveals that online retailers frequently use personal data, such as browsing history and location, to target consumers with different pricing for the same products.
Based on documents from firms like Mastercard and Accenture, the FTC showed how intermediaries adjust prices by tracking various consumer behaviors. This can include the type of product, mouse movements, and unpurchased items left in shopping carts.1
This ongoing study underscores the potential widespread, data-driven pricing practices used to reshape how products are sold and how much consumers pay for them.
How Consumers Are Affected by Surveillance Pricing
Instead of having fixed prices for products, surveillance pricing allows retailers to adjust the price or promotion of a product based on individual data and consumer behaviors. If the data suggests that the consumer is willing to pay more, the price will be higher.
“Surveillance pricing means consumers lose the ability to compare prices accurately because what they see may be tailored to their behavior, location, income level, or even browsing history. Should someone be charged a higher price just because they live in a certain zip code, or because they made a bad online purchase last year? Thanks to surveillance pricing, that’s the world we’re living in,” said Michael Mezzatesta, economics and climate educator, and founder of Better Future Media.
Who’s Paying the Price?
About 273 million Americans, or 80.4%, now shop online, according to a survey by Capital One. Collectively, they spent about $1.36 trillion online in 2024.2
“Since surveillance pricing happens mostly online, most people will have no idea they’re being shown different prices based on hidden algorithms, making it nearly impossible to make informed purchasing decisions. In the worst cases, this practice erodes trust in markets, where fairness should be a given, not a privilege reserved for those with the best data protection habits,” Mezzatesta said.
How to Protect Yourself
Consumers can not easily recognize when they are victims of surveillance pricing because it’s designed to be invisible. But there are clues to be seen by those who are wary.
“There are clues consumers can use to tell when surveillance pricing might be at play. For example, if consumers notice fluctuating prices after repeated visits to a site, or different prices across different devices–or their peers are seeing different prices–those are all signs they are likely experiencing surveillance pricing influenced by personal or device data,” said Mezzatesta.
Proactive Steps to Take
To protect themselves from surveillance, consumers can take several proactive steps to safeguard their personal information and ensure fair pricing.
Use a VPN: A virtual private network, or VPN, masks your location and browsing activity to prevent targeted pricing. There are free VPNs while a subscription service costs about $10 per month.3
Clear Browser Cookies Regularly: Clearing the cookies from your device regularly limits the ability to track your online behavior because the data has been deleted.
Browse in Incognito Mode: Your browsing history and personal data aren’t saved when browsing in Incognito mode.
Compare Prices Across Devices: Check prices on different devices to spot potential price differences.
“The bigger issue is that individuals shouldn’t have to outsmart an opaque system just to get fair treatment and transparent pricing. This is where regulation needs to step in,” Mezzatesta said.
Current regulations, such as the FTC Act and the California Consumer Privacy ACT (CCPA), aim to protect consumers by promoting transparency and control over personal data.45 However, these laws do not fully address surveillance pricing, leaving gaps in consumer protection.
Is This Price-Fixing?
The FTC defines price fixing as “an agreement (written, verbal, or inferred from conduct) among competitors to raise, lower, maintain, or stabilize prices or price levels.”6 Basically, companies can’t set prices or terms after setting up an agreement with their competition because consumers expect the basic laws of supply and demand to apply. But then the question becomes, is surveillance pricing “price fixing”?
“The simplest solution is to make algorithmic price fixing illegal. And there is a legal precedent for this: Under US antitrust laws, price fixing due to corporate collusion is illegal.7 The issue is that the development of automated price-setting algorithms has created loopholes in existing law,” Mezzatesta said.
Mezzatesta asserts that corporations will need new rules regarding collecting and using personal data because of the rise of big data algorithms. He claims that’s how we ensure the algorithms don’t discriminate against specific sets of consumers.
“Additionally, enforcement mechanisms should be in place to prevent predatory pricing that exploits consumer data to extract maximum profit from the public. At a minimum, companies should be required to disclose when prices are being personalized, and on what basis.”89
The Bottom Line
Online shopping offers unmatched convenience, making it a preferred choice for many consumers. However, shoppers want to feel comfortable purchasing online without worrying about unfair pricing.
Unless stronger consumer protections are passed into law, you will need to stay vigilant and take steps to ensure your data is not exploited.
Google slashed traffic to Mercola.com by 99.9%, replacing years of trusted content with pharma-backed search results that promote junk food and drugs as “healthcare” solutions
A new term, “nonaginate,” describes Google’s tactic of wiping out 90% or more of alternative health websites’ visibility — a practice now threatening hundreds of holistic sources
Under the guise of safety, Google uses vague policies like EEAT and YMYL to bury licensed doctors and researchers who question mainstream pharmaceutical narratives
Google’s so-called “quality raters” depend on Wikipedia for judgments about credibility — even though its anonymous editors openly oppose natural health and block factual corrections
To protect your health freedom and privacy, I recommend ditching all Google products — from search to Gmail — and switching to platforms that respect your data and independence
Have you noticed how it’s getting more challenging to find non-mainstream health info in your search results lately? That’s not your imagination — it’s a deliberate tactic employed by Google to control the information you see. They’re targeting websites that question pharmaceutical orthodoxy or promote natural approaches to health, even those that are run by licensed practitioners, researchers, and authors with longstanding reputations — myself included.
I’ve been sounding the alarm on Google’s monopoly for several years now, and how they’re gravely endangering the free-flow of information, particularly in the health industry. Google views alternative health as a threat to Big Pharma, and uses its search ranking system to severely reduce natural health websites’ visibility and accessibility to the general public.
‘Nonagination’ — Google’s Attempt to Suppress Alternative Health Information
In his Substack page, Bill Dembski, a researcher, design theorist, and mathematician, wrote an extensive exposé on “the evilization of Google,”1 and how this nefarious company strategically dismantled the reach and visibility of alternative health websites, including Mercola.com. Dembski introduced the term “nonaginate” to describe a tactic that goes far beyond censorship.2
•What does “nonaginate” mean? Dembski says this word was inspired by “decimate,” which dates to the old Roman practice of eliminating “one-tenth of an unruly band of Roman soldiers.” However, what Google does is so much worse, so using the word decimate is a grave understatement.
•It’s much worse than decimation — Dembski then turned to the Latin term for 90, “nonaginta,” and from here, he coined the word “nonaginate,” saying that this was a better-suited word for what this company does.
“Nonaginate — hat tip to Google for inspiring the term — is thus defined as destroying at least ninety percent of a thing. Nonagination is therefore much more extreme than decimation (in decimation’s strict literal sense of only destroying ten percent). Google prefers to nonaginate sites it doesn’t like,” he writes.
•I first-handedly experienced nonagination back in 2019 — Six years ago, on June 3, 2019, to be exact, Google implemented a broad “core update” that eliminated most Mercola.com pages from its search results. Virtually overnight, Google traffic to my site dropped by approximately 99.9%.
•Decades of valuable health information has been buried — Since 1997, Mercola.com has been considered a highly relevant source of health content, and has been one of the top natural health websites worldwide. But in one fell swoop, Google removed all our high-ranked results, and replaced them with health information from advertising companies that promote junk food and drugs instead.
Google Hides Behind Its So-Called ‘Policies’
Mercola.com wasn’t the only victim of nonagination — countless alternative health websites were also hit with similar penalties, losing their visibility, reach, and revenue streams. For many, this meant bankruptcy. Yet, Google does not publicly admit to this bias; instead, it hides behind abstract policy language.3
•Bias is hidden behind policies that claim neutrality — To justify its move to downrank alternative health websites, Google invokes content guidelines like “Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness” (EEAT), and “Your Money or Your Life” (YMYL).4
•On paper, these standards sound like they exist to protect users — But in practice, they create a false sense of objectivity that allows Google to bury dissenting voices without admitting to any ideological filtering. Even licensed physicians and researchers are downgraded if they suggest that healing might come from something other than patented drugs.
•This suppression is systemic, not incidental — EEAT and YMYL policies are enforced by both machine algorithms and human raters, all trained to flag anything outside of conventional dogma as untrustworthy — even if that information is backed by clinical experience or published studies.
•The result? Websites that promote natural, research-backed concepts like real food, mitochondrial health, sunlight exposure, or EMF reduction are treated the same way as snake oil scams. Google nonaginates them in the name of “safety.”
From Crowdsourcing to Crowd Control
In the past, google search results were based on crowdsource relevance. An article’s rankings on Google search would ascend based on the number of people who clicked on it. Basically, if you produced unique and high-quality content that matched what people were looking for, you were rewarded by ranking in the top of search results.
•To help you ideate this, here’s an example — Let’s say you have an article about Akkermansia that is found on the seventh page of Google’s search results, and then your competitor also has an Akkermansia article on the fifth page of search results. If more people click on your article than your competitor’s, your article will move up in rank. So, in a nutshell, these search results are based on popularity.
•But this is no longer the case — Now, Google is manually lowering the ranking of undesirable content with the help of “quality raters.” These raters are basing their feedback largely on Wikipedia’s assessment of the author or site (more on this in the next section).
•Who are these so-called quality raters? According to the company’s Search Quality Rater Guidelines, they have 16,000 external search quality raters working for them to “provide ratings based on our guidelines and represent real users and their likely information needs, using their best judgment to represent their locale.”5
•However, these raters are not Google employees — Rather, they are employed by external firms who have contracted them to Google. According to an article by ARS Technica:
“They’re carefully trained and tested staff who can spend 40 hours per week logged into a system called Raterhub, which is owned and operated by Google. Every day, the raters complete dozens of short but exacting tasks that produce invaluable data about the usefulness of Google’s ever-changing algorithms.
They contribute significantly to several Google and Android projects, from search and voice recognition to photos and personalization features.”6
Google Quality Raters Rely on Wikipedia for ‘Expertise’ and ‘Trustworthiness’
As mentioned earlier, one of the primary sources Google’s quality raters are instructed to use when assessing the expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness of an author or website is Wikipedia, “the free encyclopedia.”
•Wikipedia is highly biased against natural health — Unfortunately for many of us in the field of alternative health, Wikipedia’s founder and editors are well-known to have extreme bias against natural health content and authors.
•What’s more, the editors are completely anonymous — Wikipedia’s editors are purely volunteers, and there are a few who have reached the most powerful editing status. They’re known as the administrators. However, you will not know their identity as they hide behind pseudonyms and usernames.
So, basically, you have no idea whether the editors who are editing your content are truly experts on the topic. So how can we consider Wikipedia to be an authority of credibility when the editors are anonymous and uncredentialed?
Wikipedia Is Aggressive When It Comes to Censorship
While Google’s censoring of content started just several years ago, Wikipedia has been censoring information and blocking editors since the beginning. About 1,000 users are blocked from the platform on any given day.
•Wikipedia is often edited by people with a very specific agenda — According to investigative journalist Sheryl Attkisson, anyone who tries to clarify or clear up inaccuracies on the site is simply blocked. The reality is a far cry from Wikipedia’s public promise, which is to provide readers with unbiased information.
•Google is funding Wikipedia — Considering its history of bias and its incredibly effective blocking of opposing views, no matter how factual, it’s not surprising that Wikipedia is Google’s chosen arbiter of expertise and credibility. And Wikipedia is profiting from this partnership, financially speaking. In January 2019, Google donated $2 million to Wikimedia Endowment, Wikipedia’s parent organization, and another $1.1 million to the Wikimedia Foundation.
•So what does this mean? Since Google’s freelance raters rely on Wikipedia, it means the whole “quality rating” system they’ve set up is rotten from the ground up, as its quality raters are instructed to base their quality decisions on an already biased source.
Google Is the World’s Biggest Monopoly
There’s no doubt that Google is now one of the largest and clearest monopolies in the world. It monopolizes several different markets, including search and advertising. In the case of search, it controls 90% of the market; its closest competitor, Bing, only has 2% of the market.7 Google also controls about 60% of the global advertising revenue on the internet.
•Google’s primary business is the harvesting of user data — Google catches every single thing you do online if you’re using a Google-based feature, and this data is then used to build powerful personality profiles that are sold for profit and used in a variety of different ways.
This data gathering goes far beyond what most people realize was even possible and is one of the primary reasons smaller advertisers cannot compete — they don’t have the user data Google has.
•Google also owns DeepMind, the world’s greatest artificial intelligence (AI) company — With nearly 6,000 employees worldwide,8 many of them AI researchers, it is not hard for them to sort through all your data with their deep learning algorithms to detect patterns that can be exploited for profit.
•Unfortunately, many still fail to see the problem Google presents — Its services are useful and practical, making life easier in many ways, and more fun in others. However, the complete and utter loss of privacy is a high price to be paid for such conveniences. Ultimately, your user data and personal details can be used for everything from creating personalized advertising to AI-equipped robotic warfare applications.
Say Goodbye to Google Today
Today, being a conscious consumer includes making wise, informed decisions about technology, and one of the greatest personal data leaks in your life is Google. If you need an extensive list on just how pervasive Google is, I recommend reading my article, “Goodbye Google.”
Here’s a summary of action steps for you to take right now to protect your privacy. I recommend sharing them with your friends and family so they too can protect themselves from Google’s data theft practices.
•Swap out your browser — Uninstall Google Chrome and use Brave or Opera instead. Everything you do on Chrome is surveilled, including keystrokes and every webpage you’ve ever visited. Brave is a great alternative that takes privacy seriously.
•Switch your search engine — Stop using Google search engines or any extension of Google, such as Bing or Yahoo, both of which draw search results from Google. Instead, use a default search engine that offers privacy, such as Presearch, Startpage, DuckDuckGo, Qwant and many others.
•Use a secure email — Close your Gmail account and switch to a secure email service like ProtonMail. If you have children, don’t transfer their student Google account into a personal account once they’re out of school.
•Switch to a secure document sharing service — Ditch Google Docs and use another alternative such as Zoho Office, Etherpad, CryptPad, OnlyOffice or Nuclino, all of which are recommended by NordVPN.9
•Delete all Google apps from your phone and purge Google hardware — Better yet, get a de-Googled phone. Several companies now offer them, including Above Phone.
•Avoid websites that use Google Analytics — To do that, you’ll need to check the website’s privacy policy and search for “Google.” Websites are required to disclose if they use a third-party surveillance tool. If they use Google Analytics, ask them to switch!
•Use a secure messaging system — To keep your private communications private, use a messaging tool that provides end-to-end encryption, such as Signal.
•Use a virtual private network (VPN) such as NordVPN or Strong VPN — This is a must if you seek to preserve your online privacy.
•Don’t use Google Home devices in your house or apartment — These devices record everything that occurs in your home, both speech and sounds such as brushing your teeth and boiling water, even when they appear to be inactive, and send that information back to Google. The same goes for Google’s home thermostat Nest and Amazon’s Alexa.
•Don’t use an Android cellphone, as it’s owned by Google.
•Ditch Siri, which draws all its answers from Google.
•Don’t use Fitbit — It was recently purchased by Google and will provide them with all your physiological information and activity levels, in addition to everything else that Google already has on you.
