Phone about to die? Uber will charge you more.

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Uber charges you higher prices when you’re most desperate, such as when your phone battery is about to run out.

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Lina Khan, the Chair of the Federal Trade Commission, shared one of the more disturbing things they found when researching personalized pricing regarding Uber prices in this Belgium study:

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• It was two people at the very same time.
• One person had 84% on their battery, and the other had 12%.
• The 12% person was charged more from the same location going to the same place.

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Personalized pricing, or “surveillance pricing,” was once a theoretical exercise for economists to see whether it created surplus value.

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This 2024 MIT study concluded that personalized pricing lowers consumer surplus by 2.5% (consumers are getting less of a deal) and increases overall surplus by 5.2% (businesses capture more value potentially cause they can charge higher prices to those willing to pay more).

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We’re now reaching a reality where companies have collected enough data to implement personalized pricing at scale.