By Rachael O'ConnorShareNewsweek is a Trust Project memberA new bill aiming to protect consumers from paying more than they should for different products has been praised by a member of New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani's transitional team.
New York's new state budget includes disclosure requirements for businesses that use consumers' personal data to set different prices, depending on how you shop. For example, a person who regularly splurges on online shopping may be given a higher price for a product than someone who hasn't been on the site, or bought multiple items, before.
Now, according to the New York Times, the new requirements would see businesses have to tell customers that the price they are seeing "was set by an algorithm using your personal data."
Lina Khan, former chair of the Federal Trade Commission and now co-chair of the mayoral transition team for mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani, has praised the law. She called it an "absolutely vital" tool for authorities scrutinizing personal pricing, but added that there was "more work to be done" to regulate it.
NYC Mayor-elect Mamdani won a major victory in the recent elections, defeating Governor Andrew Cuomo with a clear majority. He has faced repeated criticisms from President Donald Trump, who called him a "communist lunatic" and threatened to withhold federal funding from New York if he won.
...Mamdani had promised free child care and a rent freeze for New Yorkers, in a bid to make the city affordable for the everyday person, with the world now watching to see how those promises hold up.
In Mamdani's victory speech, he told voters they had delivered "a mandate for a new kind of politics; a mandate for a city we can afford; and a mandate for a government that delivers exactly that."
Things appear to have calmed since Mamdani was declared the winner, as the two met at the White House in November, and Trump endorsed him as mayor. Mamdani will take office on January 1, 2026.
The National Retail Federation has filed a lawsuit to try to prevent the personalized pricing law, but a federal judge has allowed it to move forward; business interests have complained the law is too broad and will cause confusion, while some consumers' rights groups worry it was too narrow to protect shoppers meaningfully.
A report from the Federal Trade Commission warned that retailers were using customers' personal information to set prices—however, the extent to which large companies are doing so is unclear.
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