During Amazon’s semi-annual Prime Day bonanza, the underwear I usually buy were on deep discount at a price so low I assumed it was just for me, the frequent shopper. I got three packs and felt good about it. But a few days ago, when I saw the news that Delta was using AI to personalize its flight prices, I got mad. I started to suspect that something sinister was behind my great deal on drawers at Amazon. Was that sale just for me? Where else have I been paying personalized prices?

Delta CEO Glen Hauenstein actually announced last year that the airline was using AI to do “a full reengineering of how we price and how we will be pricing in the future” at its annual Investor Day event. He promised, somewhat ominously, that airfares would be determined “on that flight, on that time, to you, the individual.” Last week, Hauenstein ignited a furor telling investors that Delta was currently using the technology on 3 percent of flight prices and planned to boost that to 20 percent by the end of this year.

Welcome to the era of hyper-personalized pricing. Companies are increasingly deploying AI-powered technology that is capable of identifying thousands of different real-time signals — everything from your location and loyalty status to your device and search history — to sell the same product to two different people for two different prices. This represents an advanced form of dynamic pricing, the age-old practice of adjusting prices based on market conditions. With the help of algorithms and reams of data, some businesses are taking a new, personalized approach: surveillance pricing. Dynamic pricing is perfectly legal, but surveillance pricing and the accompanying privacy concerns are new.

Suffice to say, consumers don’t like the idea of companies using AI to set prices. On Wednesday, Democratic Rep. Greg Casar announced plans to introduce a bill that would ban surveillance pricing at a federal level. Arizona Sen. Ruben Gallego accused Delta of “using AI to find your pain point — meaning they’ll squeeze you for every penny” and sent the company an angry letter, which was cosigned by Sens. Mark Warner of Virginia and Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut. And earlier this month, New York enacted a law that requires sellers to disclose when........

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