What Moved: Scoreboard Week of November 13, 2026

One decision recorded this week, and it sits in the Use Restricted column: New York City's Council voted 44-5 on November 12 to ban surveillance pricing. The other three columns are blank.

State of Surveillance

Net movement on the US Surveillance Scoreboard for the week of November 7 to 13, 2026:

  • Contracts gained, systems expanded, or newly deployed: 0 recorded this week.
  • Contracts canceled, terminated, or not renewed: 0 recorded this week.
  • Use restricted by law, ordinance, court ruling, or binding audit: 1 recorded this week.
  • Devices physically destroyed, as reported by named sources: 0 recorded this week.

Scope: this counts decisions State of Surveillance reported between November 7 and November 13, 2026. It is not a national total.

The One Decision Recorded This Week

Use Restricted: New York City Bans Surveillance Pricing

Who decided: The New York City Council, which voted 44-5 on Thursday, November 12, 2026, on Introduction 891-A, the surveillance pricing ban sponsored by Speaker Julie Menin [1][2].

What was decided, and when: On November 12, 2026, the Council passed a local law defining "surveillance pricing" as "pricing set completely or in part by an algorithm that uses personal data to offer different prices to different customers for the same goods or services and does not include bona fide custom discounts" [3]. The bill bars any service provider or other entity from advertising, promoting, labeling or publishing a price set that way, and bars any service provider or other entity from collecting, using, selling, retaining, sharing for valuable consideration, or disclosing personal data "for the purpose of facilitating surveillance pricing to the consumer" [3]. The Council's legislative record lists the status as "Enacted (Mayor's Desk for Signature)" [3].

The Council's own account of the bill cites two investigations [1]. One found "individualized price differences as high as 23 percent" at a major grocery delivery platform. Another found a television's price climbing "from $499.99 to $599.99 when the consumer pulled into the store's parking lot". At a June hearing on the bill, Menin described a Council investigation that used 10 rideshare accounts for approximately 370 pricing checks across three standard routes, and investigators found that "some accounts repeatedly received automatically applied discounts that others did not when checking the same route at the same time" [2].

What it changes on the ground: Very little yet, and a lot in a year. The law takes effect one year after it becomes law, a start date am New York reports was extended from 120 days after enactment [2][3]. Until then there is nothing to enforce. When it starts, the operational requirement is paperwork: a business that uses surveillance pricing must develop and maintain procedures telling consumers what personal data was considered and how, and make that data available to the department electronically upon request [3].

Penalties run through the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection, which can issue civil penalties of up to $1,000 for each violation, "with every consumer or transaction affected constituting a separate violation" [5]. They reach what the bill calls covered businesses: "any single entity or any entity that is part of a chain with fewer than 15 locations nationally" that conducts most of its business from New York City locations [3]. The Council's fiscal impact statement puts the cost of enforcement at approximately $207,818 in fiscal year 2028, rising to $356,258 annually beginning in fiscal year 2029, funding four added department posts: two investigators, an attorney and a community associate [2]. The agency asked for a private right of action, so consumers could sue, and did not get one. Commissioner Sam Levine told the committee that "it's important to buttress administrative enforcement with private enforcement" [2].

Three openings survived the vote, and Consumer Reports had asked the Council to strengthen the bill before it passed, with three recommendations: close the "location data" loophole, tighten or remove the exemption for the use of purchase history data, and remove the corrective action request language in the enforcement section [6].

The first is location data. The bill's definition of personal data excludes location data a consumer affirmatively and knowingly shares for "calculating trip duration and mileage costs" or for assessing "current or historical local supply and demand conditions" [3]. The second is purchase history. A business may discount on what a customer bought from it before, provided that data "is not paired, combined, or cross-referenced with any other personal data except enrollment in the loyalty, membership, or rewards program" [3]. The third is the enforcement clause. For a first violation, the department must notify the business, the business gets 30 days to demonstrate corrective action, and a violation "shall not be considered corrected" unless the business provided restitution to the consumers harmed by it [2][3].

Menin said the Council "is putting consumers first by ending the deceptive and insidious practice of surveillance pricing" [1]. Mayor Zohran Mamdani backs the bill and called surveillance pricing "just another way corporations are finding to squeeze working people" [4]. Uber spokesman Josh Gold said, "If enacted, this law will make it harder for small restaurants with limited marketing budgets to reach customers, putting them at a disadvantage against national chains" [4]. The full account of the vote, the bill text and the three openings is here: NYC Bans Surveillance Pricing: The Loopholes That Survived.

What Did Not Move This Week

The other three categories on the scoreboard are blank for this week, recorded against State of Surveillance reporting between November 7 and November 13, 2026. No contract was gained, canceled or rejected in our coverage. No new instance of physical device destruction was reported by a named outlet or agency. The restricted column moved once, and that row is the one above. Empty sections are intentional, and the scoreboard does not fill rows from secondary sources, vendor announcements, or investigations without an outcome [13].

Five items from the week are easy to mistake for rows. None of them is one.

The appeals court order narrowing the LinkedIn request. A unanimous three-judge panel ordered a district court to narrow the Justice Department's request for 18 months of LinkedIn communications from journalists. Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III wrote that "Many of the users identified have no conceivable relationship to the leak investigation" [7]. This is a court ruling on government surveillance and it is the closest thing to a row this week. It is not a row yet, for two reasons: the site has not published a dedicated story on the order, and the scoreboard does not create rows out of daily briefings. If we commission a story on it, it belongs in the restricted column.

The two ALPR amicus briefs. On November 9, the EFF filed a brief alongside the ACLU in the Sixth Circuit in United States v. Sturdivant, asking the court to "hold that ALPR searches require a warrant" [8]. The same two groups asked the Ninth Circuit to hold reverse location warrants categorically unconstitutional in United States v. Spurlock, which EFF described on November 4 [9]. A brief is advocacy on a question no court has answered. The October 1 ruling in the Northern District of Oklahoma, the only court ruling among the ALPR rows on the scoreboard, is unchanged. Our coverage of the tower dump case is here.

The CISA nomination. The president nominated Palantir's chief information security officer Michael LoSapio to lead the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, announced Monday, November 9 [10]. A nomination is not a confirmed appointment, and it is not a procurement decision.

The Amazon Photos class certification. A federal judge certified Hogan v. Amazon.com, Inc. as a class action covering Illinois residents whose faces were processed in photos uploaded to their own accounts between October 18, 2016 and January 31, 2023. Amazon identified 339,847 Illinois-linked accounts with image recognition enabled during that period [11]. Certifying a class is not a ruling on liability, and it does not restrict anyone's use of the technology.

The UK watchdog inspection. His Majesty's Chief Inspector of Constabulary and Fire & Rescue Services found that UK police "couldn't clearly show performance improvements from using RFR," or retrospective facial recognition, while law enforcement makes more than 300,000 retrospective search requests a year [12]. It is a UK inspection report, not a US decision, and a report is not a decision in any of the four columns.

How We Count, and Where This Row Sits

The scoreboard logs an event when a named jurisdiction does something one of our stories documents: a contract signed or canceled, a law, ordinance or ruling that limits use, or devices physically destroyed and reported by a named outlet [13]. Everything counted above was reported by State of Surveillance between November 7 and November 13, 2026, and none of it is a national total.

One thing worth being straight about. The scoreboard page's own scope statement is about automatic license plate readers and similar surveillance systems, and the decision above is a municipal law about commercial pricing, which this site covers on a separate beat. It is counted here because it is a decision by a named jurisdiction that restricted a use of collected personal data by law, and because the site published a dedicated story on it this week. The scoreboard page itself still carries its October 12, 2026 review stamp and does not show this row. Where the row is filed on that page is a maintenance-pass question, not a question about what happened in New York City on November 12.

For context on the state layer: New York's One Fair Price Act was signed on June 17, and the Washington Post faced a class-action over it, covered here. The wider map of state bans sits on the state-by-state tracker. The standing ALPR tally on the US Surveillance Scoreboard still carries the October 1 ruling in the Northern District of Oklahoma [13].

Read plainly, this was a week with one decision, and it was a council vote rather than a camera contract. The law is a year from having teeth, the three openings Consumer Reports flagged are still in the text, and the department that enforces it will run on four new posts. The other three columns on the scoreboard did not move, and the closest thing to a row, the appeals court's order narrowing the government's LinkedIn request, is waiting on a dedicated story before it counts.

Sources

  1. New York City Council: "New York City Council Approves Landmark Legislation Banning Surveillance Pricing" (November 12, 2026)
  2. am New York: "Same product, different price? NYC Council passes ban on companies using your data to set prices" (November 12, 2026)
  3. New York City Council Legislative Tracking System: Int 0891-2026, "Prohibiting surveillance pricing" (November 12, 2026)
  4. Gothamist, Elizabeth Kim: "NYC Council passes ban on 'surveillance pricing' that relies on personal data" (November 12, 2026)
  5. New York City Council: "New York City Council to Vote on Surveillance Pricing Ban" (November 12, 2026)
  6. Consumer Reports: "Consumer Reports urges New York City Council to strengthen the surveillance pricing ban" (October 30, 2026)
  7. Ars Technica, Ashley Belanger: "Trump admin loses fight to spy on random journalists' LinkedIn DMs" (November 11, 2026)
  8. Electronic Frontier Foundation, Andrew Crocker: "We're Asking an Appeals Court to Require a Warrant for ALPR Searches" (November 9, 2026)
  9. Electronic Frontier Foundation, Andrew Crocker: "We're Asking the Ninth Circuit to Hold Reverse Location Warrants Categorically Unconstitutional" (November 4, 2026)
  10. The Register, Carly Page: "Trump taps Palantir security chief to run battered US cyber defense agency" (November 10, 2026)
  11. Biometric Update, Chris Burt: "Amazon Photos biometric privacy lawsuit certified as class action" (November 12, 2026)
  12. Biometric Update, Chris Burt: "UK police don't know how much retrospective facial recognition helps: inspection" (November 12, 2026)
  13. State of Surveillance: US Surveillance Scoreboard: ALPR Decisions by Jurisdiction (last reviewed October 12, 2026)