Nine major corporations in the transportation, delivery and retail sectors have received formal demands from America's Federal Trade Commission to supply extensive documentation regarding their use of personal information in determining prices charged to individual consumers and compensation paid to workers.
The FTC sent orders to JetBlue, Delta, United, Lyft, Uber, DoorDash, Instacart, Walmart and Target. Failure to comply within the specified timeframe could result in enforcement action through federal courts.
The agency intends to examine whether pricing for airline tickets, rides, meal deliveries and other goods fluctuates between customers based on factors including loyalty program membership or algorithmic analysis of personal information. Companies that engage gig workers must also disclose the mechanisms, systems and processes they employ to adjust individual worker earnings and customer pricing using personal data and other distinguishing characteristics.
FTC Chair Andrew Ferguson highlighted concerns about the "opaque methodology" that businesses may employ when deciding what individual customers should pay or what compensation individual workers should receive. Ferguson stated that consumers should understand whether companies leverage their internet activity or other personal information to calculate the maximum price a particular customer might accept and the minimum wage a specific worker might tolerate.
Ride-sharing and food-delivery platforms may adjust worker compensation using unclear formulas that potentially exploit driver personal data, such as device usage patterns and historical payment acceptance rates, according to the agency's statement.
The nine firms have 45 days to provide their responses. The FTC's statutory authority permits the agency to demand information from industries for investigative purposes that do not necessarily involve specific enforcement actions.
Context from prior investigation
This action follows a July 2024 FTC order directed at eight companies seeking details on how they enabled third-party surveillance operations to generate differentiated pricing for identical products or services according to personal information.
Shortly before departing her role in January 2025, then-chair Lina Khan released preliminary findings derived from data supplied by McKinsey & Co., Accenture, Revionics and five additional firms. Ferguson subsequently objected to Khan's release, announced the closure of that investigation and indicated he would withhold the complete findings.
The earlier inquiry was terminated because it relied on information from "middlemen consultancies," according to the agency's latest statement. "The agency learned nothing about actual pricing decisions from the 2024 study," it said. "This study corrects the commission's mistaken 2024 approach and demands information directly from companies who may be engaging in personalized pricing, rather than middlemen."
The eight previously contacted "middleman consultancies" marketed surveillance-based pricing solutions to clients rather than implementing algorithm-driven pricing themselves.
In August, the FTC invited public input on a draft enforcement policy statement addressing whether setting prices through undisclosed personal data analysis may constitute unlawful conduct under FTC Act provisions.
