Your phone knows when your battery is dying, where you’re standing, and how desperate you are. According to ThrottleNet owner George Rosenthal, some apps are using that against you. On this week’s Tech Talk Tuesday with Mark Reardon on 97.1 FM Talk, George broke down “surveillance pricing,” the sneaky subscription charges quietly draining your bank account every month, and the hidden ways your own car might be reporting your driving habits to your insurance company. Interested in learning more? Continue reading below.
Surveillance Pricing: When AI Knows You’re Desperate
Most people are familiar with dynamic pricing, flights cost more on a Friday than a Tuesday. But George explained that a newer, more troubling practice called surveillance pricing has entered the picture. Instead of just adjusting prices based on demand, apps and retailers are now using AI to track your behavior in real time and raise prices based on your personal circumstances.
George gave a vivid example: you’re at the airport with 4% battery left and need to rebook a flight. The booking app knows your battery is nearly dead, knows your location, and knows you have almost no leverage to shop around, so it raises the price right then and there, betting you’re too desperate to say no.
The Federal Trade Commission is already looking into these practices as a potential deceptive trade practice. In the meantime, George offered a few practical ways to protect yourself:
- Book on a web browser in incognito mode rather than a mobile app or a logged-in browser session, especially for flights, hotels, and rental cars.
- Turn off cross-app tracking on iPhone: go to Settings > Privacy & Security > Tracking, and disable “Allow Apps to Request to Track.”
- Reset your advertising ID on Android in your privacy settings.
As a bonus, George noted that disabling this tracking also tends to improve your phone’s battery life.
Ghost Subscriptions and Zombie Charges Are Draining Your Wallet
The average household is paying for around 12 monthly subscription services, and George pointed out that roughly 30% of all app billing today comes from what he calls “zombie charges”: small, forgotten fees like $0.99 or $2.99 that quietly renew month after month long after anyone stopped using the service.
Part of the problem, George explained, is a change in how billing works: subscriptions used to cancel automatically if your card was lost, stolen, or expired. Now, providers are allowed to carry your subscription over to your new card number, which means the old trick of “canceling by losing your card” no longer works.
George’s advice is simple: do a subscription audit every month.
- On iPhone, go to Settings > [Your Name] > Subscriptions to review and cancel active subscriptions directly.
- On Android, open the Google Play Store > Payments & Subscriptions and cancel anything unused in the last 30 days.
- Use a money-management tool (like Rocket Money) to flag recurring charges you may have forgotten about.
- If you have kids on Xbox, PlayStation, or similar platforms, make sure they aren’t sharing their usernames and passwords with friends, shared logins are a common source of surprise charges for add-ons and in-game purchases.
George shared his own story of getting hit with a mysterious $120 annual Xbox charge on a nearly unused Best Buy card and having so much trouble canceling it directly that he eventually had to cancel the card entirely just to make it stop.
Your Car May Be Reporting Your Driving Habits
The segment wrapped up with a warning for parents of new drivers, but the takeaway applies to anyone with a connected car. Many vehicles today come with an app and buried in the checkboxes you agree to, both at the dealership and inside the app, is permission for granular telemetry tracking: hard braking, rapid acceleration, late-night trips, and more.
That data doesn’t just sit in your car. It’s reported to companies like LexisNexis Risk Solutions, which can influence your future insurance rates, and George noted it’s also sold as part of your broader digital profile. If you want to know whether your vehicle is tracking you, you can request a free annual Consumer Disclosure Report from LexisNexis Risk Solutions, which will show what driving-habit data has been logged and shared about you.
George mentioned he personally opted out of OnStar tracking on his own GM vehicle for exactly this reason, even though some drivers like the added sense of safety it provides.
The Bottom Line
Between AI-driven pricing, forgotten subscriptions, and cars quietly reporting your driving habits, staying on top of your digital footprint takes a little bit of regular maintenance. George’s advice: audit your subscriptions monthly, go incognito for big purchases, and know what your devices (including your car) are sharing about you.
Catch George Rosenthal live every Tuesday at 5:30 pm for Tech Talk Tuesday on the Mark Reardon Show, 97.1 FM Talk. Have a tech question you’d like answered on air? Reach out to [email protected]. To learn more about ThrottleNet’s managed services click here!
