New York Ends Legislative Session Focused on Surveillance Pricing and Website Crawlers

As the New York State Legislature concluded its 2025–2026 session, lawmakers approved two significant measures: (1) the One Fair Price Act, which aims to ban surveillance-based pricing practices throughout the state; and (2) the Stealth Crawler Prohibition Act, which equips news organizations and journalism providers with new tools to combat unauthorized bot traffic and infringing website crawlers. An overview of each Act is below.

The bills now await action by Governor Hochul. It is unlikely that the governor will take any action on any of the passed bills until after the November 7, 2026 gubernatorial election.

Additionally, should Governor Hochul be reelected, it is likely the bills will be “chaptered” —i.e., modified— prior to signature. Historically, chaptering a bill was focused on cleaning up typos or making minor edits; more recently, however, the practice of chaptering bills prior to the governor’s signature has been more substantive in nature and includes further consultation with legislative sponsors’ offices and other modifications.

The bills are set to take effect 180 days after the governor’s signature. Assuming a post-election day signature, this means the earliest calculation of the bills’ effective date is Friday, May 7, 2027.

1. New York One Fair Price Act (S-8623)

The One Fair Price Act seeks to amend last year’s Algorithmic Pricing Disclosure Act (APDA) additions to NY’s General Business Law by, most significantly, striking the hotly contested disclosure requirement (“This Price Was Set By an Algorithm Using Personal Data”). As previously explained in a Clark Hill alert, the constitutionality of the APDA’s disclosure requirement is being challenged by a trade association and is currently pending appeal to the Second Circuit Court of Appeals. In addition to striking the APDA’s disclosure requirement, the One Fair Price Act amendments further expand the range of prohibited pricing practices and provide specific restrictions around bona fide discounts.

Specifically, the Act:

• Prohibits certain pricing practices:
  • No entity or service provider shall set or adjust the reference price or consumer price of a good or service using surveillance pricing, directly or indirectly, to a consumer.
  • No entity or service provider shall advertise, promote, label or publish a statement, display, image, offer or announcement using surveillance pricing to a consumer.
  • No entity or service provider shall collect, use, sell, retain, share for valuable consideration, or disclose personal data for the purposes of facilitating surveillance pricing to a consumer.
  • No entity or service provider shall offer a bona fide custom discount unless such discount is offered uniformly to any consumer who meets the disclosed eligibility conditions or criteria.

The Act also modifies and expands prior APDA definitions, including:

• Definitions:
  • Consumer: natural person who is seeking or solicited to purchase, lease, or receive a good or service for personal, family, or household use in New York state or from an entity domiciled in New York state.
  • Personal data: any data that identifies or could reasonably be linked, directly or indirectly, with a specific consumer or device.
    • Personal data shall not include location data that is affirmatively and knowingly provide or shared by a consumer and used (i) for purposes of calculating trip duration and mileage costs with location-based service such as transportation, delivery, and courier logistics; or (ii) to assess local supply and demand conditions.
• Surveillance pricing: pricing set completely or in part by an algorithm that uses personal data to offer difference prices to different customers for the same goods or services and does not include bona fide custom discounts.
• Bona fide custom discount (BFD): genuine reduction in price that is referred to as such to consumers, including generally available reductions in price from the reference price based on bulk purchases or subscriptions.
  • Must be established “absent of deception, abusive and unfair practices.”
  • Such BFD may include but is not limited to clearly and conspicuously posted promotional periods, end of season sales, flash sales, early-bird sales, inventory based pricing, price matching policies, and rebates, to the extent that such discount is generally available without utilization of personal data.
  • BFD means a discount consistent with laws offered by an entity:
    • To a consumer who affirmatively and knowingly enrolls in a loyalty, membership, or rewards program, including but not limited to by signing up for a mailing list, registering for a promotional communication, or participating in a promotional event, provided the discount is offered clearly and conspicuously disclosed to all members in a given local geographic market . . . Such loyalty, membership, or regards programs may include tiers of bona fide discounts based on prior purchase history data provided that the tiers are clearly and conspicuously disclosed and that such prior purchase history data is not paired, combined, or cross-referenced with other personal data except enrollment in the loyalty, membership, or rewards program;
    • That is based on a consumer voluntary self-identification with a broadly defined class of consumer including, but not limited to, military veterans, active duty personnel, seniors, teachers, or employees or individuals belonging to a class of consumers based on date of birth or anniversary of membership in loyalty program, provided affirmatively and knowingly by the consumer and is not derived or inferred by the entity from other data.
    • Specific online marketplace BFD requirements, not relevant here.
  • Reference price: the actual amount a consumer is required to pay for any good or service, including mandatory fees or charges necessary to receive such good or service except taxes or fees imposed by a government, that is openly and actively offered to the public in the regular course of business for a reasonably substantial and recent period of time.

• Consumer price: the reference price with adjustments based on a bona fide discounts, including sales, coupons, promotions, or other discounts except BF custom discounts.

The Act also provides for AG Enforcement and rule-making:

• AG may obtain order enjoining or restraining unlawful acts.
• AG has civil penalty authority of $5,000 for first violation, $20,000 for subsequent violation(s).
• AG may promulgate rules and regulations as are necessary to effectuate and enforce the provisions of this section.

1. New York Stealth Crawler Prohibition Act (S-9934A)

For years, news publishers and websites have experienced significant bot and crawler website traffic, including “stealth crawlers” used by AI platforms and technology companies to secretly access digital content.  The New York Stealth Crawler Prohibition Act seeks to give publishers new tools to defend themselves against ongoing stealth bot traffic.

 

• The Act includes the following definitions:
  • Covered news source: means any “website or any other relevant source of any print, television, radio, network, cable, satellite, or digital publication or service” that “performs a public-information function comparable to that traditionally served by journalism organizations,” “makes a substantial expenditure of labor, skill, and money to create, edit, produce and distribute content,” “publishes new content or updates its content on at least a monthly basis and has a process for error correction and clarification,” and “has at least one thousand [1,000] monthly active viewers, listeners, users or subscribers in New York.”
  • Journalism provider: means any person that owns one or more covered news sources.
  • Crawler: means software that retrieves, scans, indexes, scrapes, or otherwise accesses a website or other internet source, including but not limited to an online crawler, spider, fetcher, client, bot, user agent, AI agent, or equivalent tool.

• The Act sets forth a series of crawler requirements and prohibitions. Specifically:  
  • ( 1752) Requires crawlers to disclose their identity and purpose “at the time or before it accesses the covered news source” by:
    • “identifying itself via a valid and accurate user-agent string” (in which it must state the “identity of the software product making the request, the version of such software product, and the identity of the company behind such software product”) and
    • “disclosing the specific nature and purpose of such crawler, which shall include all uses and purposes that the content of the covered news source could be used for, at the time access is requested and in a format that the journalism provider can access”
  • ( 1753) Prohibits “any operator to deploy a stealth crawler in a manner that would damage, impair, or burden the operation of a covered news source or otherwise cause a news source economic harm.” Where stealth crawler is defined as a crawler that is not complying with the above-described disclosure requirements.

The Act provides for AG Enforcement and private entity subpoena power:

• ( 1754(1)) Allows the NY Attorney General to “bring an action in the name and on behalf of the people of the state of New York to enjoin an operator from continuing such unlawful acts or practices and may seek civil penalties of up to $15,000 per day for each violation” if the AG believes that an operator has or is about to violate any of the above requirements/prohibitions.
• ( 1754(2)(a)-(c)) Allows a journalism provider to request the issuance of a subpoena “prior to the institution of an action, to a service provider for identification of an alleged violator” (the subpoena “shall authorize and order the service provider receiving such subpoena to expeditiously disclose to the journalism provider information sufficient to identify the alleged violator to the extent such information is available to such service provider”).

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