The Washington Post has been hit with a class action lawsuit alleging the newspaper secretly used readers’ personal data to charge different subscription prices.
CourtHouse News reports that the lawsuit accuses the Bezos-owned outlet of creating “pricing profiles” based on subscribers’ reading habits, demographics, browsing activity, and other personal information.
The lawsuit, which was filed in the Superior Court of Washington, D.C., states:
The Post has been monitoring usage and implementing this pricing practice, often referred to as ‘surveillance pricing’ since at least December 2024, at which point not a single subscriber was aware of The Post’s surveillance pricing or secret harvesting of subscriber data.
The law does not allow this conduct. State attorneys general across the country along with the Federal Trade Commission have begun investigating companies that engage in ‘surveillance pricing’ (also referred to as ‘algorithmic pricing’) using consumer personal information instead of market forces to set individualized prices.
According to the plaintiffs, the practice only became public after New York required companies to disclose when algorithms use consumer data to set individualized prices.
Subscribers reportedly discovered they were being offered dramatically different rates for the same product.
One reader claimed a renewal jumped from $170 to $260, while another obtained a subscription for just $60.
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