Surveillance Pricing: How Kroger Tracks & Targets You!
The short version: The Lab Tech Show exposes how Kroger's loyalty data and shelf tech enable 'surveillance pricing,' a reminder that corporate and government tracking feed the same surveillance machine.
Our Take
Credit to The Lab Tech Show hosts Bree and Reavis for pulling back the curtain on 'surveillance pricing' — the practice of grocery chains like Kroger using loyalty card data, app clicks, and even electronic shelf labels to charge different customers different prices in real time. It sounds like a retail story, but it's really a surveillance story: once a company has built a detailed behavioral profile on you, that profile doesn't stay in the produce aisle. It gets sold, shared, subpoenaed, or breached.
This is the same data logic that powers the license plate reader network we track every day. Flock Safety and its government partners insist their cameras are just for public safety, but the underlying business model is identical to Kroger's: harvest everyday movements and transactions, store them indefinitely, and monetize or share the resulting profile with whoever asks. Whether it's a shelf tag quietly raising your price or a camera quietly logging your commute, the pattern is the same — you're the product, not the customer or the citizen being protected.
If a grocery store tracking your clicks unsettles you, take a look at how many ALPR cameras are already logging your plate on your own street. Check our camera map to see what's near you, and visit take-action for concrete steps to push back on both corporate and government surveillance creep.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of The Lab Tech Show, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.