As excerpted from Maryland Matters:

Legislative leaders and the governor don’t think retailers should be able to charge different prices for the same product based on a customer’s personal data — but if they do, the customer should at least be warned about it.

Those were among the proposals debated Tuesday during a hearing of the House Economic Matters Committee, a rare occasion when both Gov. Wes Moore (D) and House Speaker Joseline Peña-Melnyk (D-Prince George’s and Anne Arundel) came out to testify on their bills in person.

Moore, Peña-Melnyk and Senate President Bill Ferguson (D-Baltimore City) announced in January that they would be working to curtail so-called “surveillance” pricing, part of a broad effort to tackle everyday affordability issues. But the speaker took it a step further Tuesday with her bill, that would ensure that shoppers know if their data has been used to set prices.

House Bill 1475 would require stores to show shoppers a disclaimer to shoppers when the price of goods and services have been set based on “personalized algorithmic data.”

“With the rise of artificial intelligence and advanced data collection, companies now have the ability to tailor prices to individual consumers to maximize their profits,” said Duane Bond, senior policy adviser to Peña-Melnyk, during Tuesday’s hearing.

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Cailey Locklair, president of the Maryland Retailers Alliance, suggested that the disclaimer should only occur when personalized algorithmic data is used to drive prices up, not when lowering prices, since it’s “likely to unnecessarily alarm consumers.”

“Most consumers do not understand how algorithms are functioning, they may not realize that this tool is being used to generate personalized discounts, optimize our inventory, reduce waste and ultimately lower prices,” Locklair said.

Peña-Melnyk’s appearance followed testimony by the governor on one of his priority bills, the Protection from Predatory Pricing Act.

House Bill 895 would prohibit “dynamic pricing” defined in the legislation as “the practice of varying prices of consumer goods or services within a business day based on demand or other factors, including through the use of artificial intelligence or models that retrain or recalibrate based on received information in real-time.”

The legislation would prohibit food retailers from using “surveillance data” to collect information on a “consumer’s behavior, characteristics, location or other personal attributes” to set prices for an individual or a group of people.

“Here is basically how it works, prices are changing sometimes by the hour and sometimes by the minute based on where you shop and based on who is shopping,” Moore said in his testimony. “And it’s happening because digital price tags are replacing paper ones. It’s happening because we are having cameras that are watching aisles.

“It’s happening because we have apps that are moving from search-based to predictive and having true curated experiences that end up harming the average shopper,” he said. “That algorithm can crunch data into one question: How much should I charge this person, and how much can I get away with charging this person?”

But retail lobbyists like Locklair, as they have said before, denied that dynamic pricing as described in the bill is occurring widely in Maryland.

“There is no data … of widespread surveillance-based pricing abuses,” Locklair said, reiterating that the current bill language is too broad and could eliminate loyalty programs meant to reduce prices for shoppers.

Click here to read the full article from Maryland Matters.