WASHINGTON – Today, U.S. Sen. Mark R. Warner (D-VA) along with his colleagues Sens. Ruben Gallego (D-AZ) and Richard Blumental (D-CT) led their colleagues in demanding answers from Delta Air Lines CEO Ed Bastian after the company announced that it plans to ramp up its use of Artificial Intelligence to set surveillance-based ticket prices.

“Individualized pricing, or surveillance-based price setting, eliminates a fixed or static price in favor of prices that are tailored to an individual consumer’s willingness to pay. Delta’s current and planned individualized pricing practices not only present data privacy concerns, but will also likely mean fare price increases up to each individual consumer’s personal “pain point” at a time when American families are already struggling with rising costs,” wrote the senators. “The technology making that determination is trained using “all the data we can get our hands on” according to Fetcherr CEO Roy Cohen, and the company’s website claims that AI adoption and usage could increase aviation industry profits by up to $4.4 trillion annually.”

“The implications for individual consumer privacy are severe on their own. Surveillance pricing has been shown to utilize extensive personal information obtained through a variety of thirdparty channels, including data about a passenger’s purchase history, web browsing behavior, geolocation, social media activity, biometric data, and financial status,” they continued. “Former FTC Chair Lina Khan has cautioned against a particularly egregious but conceivable example of an airline using AI to charge a higher fare to a passenger ‘because the company knows that they just had a death in the family and need to fly across the country.’” 

In the letter, the senators demanded answers on the company’s plans to protect Americans from pricing discrimination. They also requested answers to a series of questions around the types and sources of data Delta will use to train this AI system, how many passengers and which routes will be impacted, and what steps the company has taken to ensure compliance will follow all applicable federal and state laws.

The full text of the letter is available here.

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