Could Your Shopping Data Affect the Price You See?
This is not a security tool and it doesn’t measure breach risk. It shows which of your shopping habits are documented as usable to set a price, and lets you test setting them aside one at a time.
Which of these do you use regularly?
Your signal log
We will not print a total. We don’t have access to the price someone else was shown for the same item.
Your next move
A claim worth treating carefully
Test it yourself in under five minutes
Anyone can run this, regardless of how the checklist above went.
- Pick one product you’re actually about to buy.
- Open it in your normal, signed-in browser and note the price.
- Open the same product in a private or incognito window, or sign out.
- If the app allows it, turn off location for that app and reload.
- Compare the two prices. No difference is informative too — and a difference alone doesn’t prove personalization, since prices also move for stock and timing.
Unlike a password-leak audit, nothing here puts an account at risk. Pick the categories you actually use, and the checklist fills in with only the signals documented for that category — a grocery delivery habit surfaces location and loyalty signals; a hotel search surfaces the device pattern from the 2012 Orbitz case.
Each line in the log is one thing you checked, plus one evidence tag and one source — documented, historical, or inferred, never blended into a guess. Checking “signed into a personal account” while grocery shopping prints a line tagged documented, citing the FTC’s own January 2025 study, because shopping and purchase history is one of the data types the agency names directly.
Setting a line aside doesn’t move a hidden score, because there isn’t one. It shows a concrete way to act on that specific signal and removes it from your next move — a visible trade, not a number changing somewhere you can’t see.
Your next move always names the most-documented signal you haven’t set aside yet, ranked only by evidence tier: documented beats historical beats inferred. It’s a starting point built from how solid the source is, not a measurement of how much danger you’re in.
How easy it would be for you to notice a difference is asked separately, because it’s a different question — not what a pricing system can see, but how likely you are to catch it if the price changes.
The category cards only appear for what you picked, each with its own honesty note: the Instacart card names a specific 2025 test and says plainly it was measured there, not predicted for you; the Target card says “alleged” and “settled,” because that’s what actually happened, not “confirmed.”
The battery-level claim about rideshare pricing sits apart from the log, tagged disputed. It’s one of the most repeated claims about this topic and one of the least supported.
The five-minute test is the one thing this calculator can’t do for you: compare the same item across two views yourself. A logged-in price and a logged-out price on the same product, checked back to back, is closer to real evidence than a checklist can produce on its own.