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The Federal Trade Commission is asking companies from food delivery services to airlines about how they use personalized prices.
The Commission said on Wednesday that it sent orders to the companies asking for details about what kind of personal information they use to determine prices. The orders target a wide range of companies, from retailers Walmart and Target to food delivery services Uber and DoorDash to airlines like Delta and United.
"Consumers deserve to know whether companies use their web surfing habits or other personal data to estimate the highest price they can charge each consumer," said FTC Chairman Andrew N. Ferguson.
"Workers also deserve to know if their compensation is affected by how companies use their personal data," Ferguson added.
Several companies pushed back against the FTC's claims.
"There is no fare product Delta has ever used, is testing or plans to use that targets customers with individualized offers based on personal data," a Delta spokesperson said.
"We do not use personal information to set prices, and we never will," Instacart said in a statement.
Walmart and Target previously said they would be transparent about their pricing strategies as more stores start using digital price tags.
A growing number of companies are using dynamic pricing to determine what customers pay for everything from concert tickets to jeans.
Some companies use similar methods to determine how much workers get paid. Uber presents its drivers with potential payouts that aren't based on a per-mile or per-minute rate, for instance, but instead consider factors such as demand.
The FTC's orders ask the companies to submit information about their pricing methodologies, including how they use AI, going back to January 1, 2023. It also asks for research that the companies have done on their pricing strategies, such as A/B tests.
The Commission is also seeking information about how the companies used similar technology to offer workers jobs, according to the orders.
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Editorial: As well as the raft of small, short-term measures to give households ‘breathing space’, the chancellor offered grounds for optimism that the Burnham government is determined to fix the economy – and rebuild national security
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Thousands of protesters gathered outside Portugal’s parliament in Lisbon on 27 October, demanding action over soaring housing costs and criticising police operations against housing activists, as the country’s long-running property crisis developed into a broader political confrontation.
The demonstration coincided with parliamentary debate on the government’s proposed 2027 budget and followed several days of protests in Lisbon and Porto.
At the centre of the dispute is an increasingly familiar European contradiction: property values continue to rise, while wages and household incomes have failed to keep pace with the cost of obtaining accommodation.
For Portugal, the problem has become particularly pronounced.
House prices have more than doubled since 2017, while rents for newly agreed tenancies have almost doubled over the same period.
According to figures reported during the demonstrations, the cost of housing in Portugal increased by 147 per cent between 2015 and 2025, compared with an EU average of 60.5 per cent.
The result is a growing disparity between earnings and the cost of independent living, particularly among younger adults.
In Lisbon, a one-bedroom flat can routinely command monthly rent of approximately €1,500.
Portugal’s minimum wage stands at €920 per month before tax.
Although these figures do not represent every household or property, they illustrate the scale of the affordability problem for lower-paid workers.
Between the first quarters of 2025 and 2026, Portuguese house prices increased by almost 20 per cent, according to national statistical figures cited in recent reporting.
Rental costs have also continued rising, recording an increase of approximately 68 per cent since 2020.
The country’s attractiveness to foreign investors, retirees and remote workers has contributed to demand, particularly in Lisbon, Porto and coastal areas.
Tourism has introduced additional competition for residential property, with some homes converted into short-term accommodation.
However, investment and tourism are only part of the explanation.
Restrictions on construction, administrative delays, limited affordable housing supply and the geographical concentration of employment have also contributed to pressure on the market.
These conditions have produced a widening gap between those who already own property and those seeking to purchase or rent their first home.
The immediate political confrontation concerns government proposals that would accelerate certain eviction procedures and remove restrictions on rents for new tenancy agreements.
The legislation passed its first parliamentary reading, with the right-wing Chega party abstaining.
Housing campaigners argue that removing protections without first increasing affordable supply could leave tenants more exposed to rising rents and displacement.
The minority centre-right government, led by Prime Minister Luís Montenegro, has pursued measures intended to encourage construction and increase the availability of housing.
These include tax reductions for new building projects and a commitment to deliver 145,000 homes.
Such measures, however, require time before additional properties become available, while many households face immediate financial pressures.
The housing dispute intensified following police operations to remove protest encampments in Lisbon and Porto during the weekend.
Police used batons during the clearances, while campaigners alleged excessive force.
According to accounts of the subsequent parliamentary demonstration, police reported 11 minor injuries, including three officers. The housing organisation Casa para Viver claimed that 60 people had been injured.
Portugal’s internal affairs watchdog has opened an inquiry, while prosecutors are conducting a separate investigation into officers’ conduct.
Montenegro defended the police response in parliament, arguing that officers had acted according to the principles of necessity, proportionality and adequacy.
President António José Seguro has convened a meeting of the Council of State to consider the growing protests.
The dispute has consequently expanded beyond housing economics to include questions about policing, public demonstrations and political accountability.
Portugal’s demonstrations follow similar protests in Spain and growing political scrutiny of housing affordability elsewhere in the EU.
The European Commission has begun addressing the issue through initiatives intended to encourage construction, facilitate investment and give authorities greater legal certainty over short-term rental restrictions.
As EU Today recently reported, the proposed European Affordable Housing Act would provide additional regulatory tools for areas facing severe housing pressure.
Yet the principal responsibilities for housing supply, planning and tenancy law remain with national and local governments.
This division creates a political challenge: Brussels can support investment and coordinate legislation, but the most immediate decisions affecting rents, construction and evictions are taken elsewhere.
For Portugal, the next test will be whether the government’s housing measures can deliver sufficient additional supply while responding to demands for immediate tenant protection.
The demonstrations outside parliament show that housing affordability has become more than a question of property prices. It now affects the government’s legislative agenda, the 2027 budget debate and the relationship between the authorities and an increasingly organised protest movement.
Editorial: The prime minister has called for an ‘honest conversation’ about EU membership – and his government is already in talks to allow Europeans to travel, live, study and work in the UK. It is a leap of faith that bodes well for closer alignment
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Maya Gourdel, a 19-year-old student in Brussels, sits at a desk writing slogans against those running her country: “If we burn, you burn with us!” The slogan, taken from the 2012 film “The Hunger Games” that has been adopted as a symbol by many youth movements globally, reflects the anger, frustration and desire for change driving Gen Z-led protests around Europe.
From the suburbs of Paris to the squares of Belgrade, thousands have taken to the streets.
The demands are various but often overlapping – frustrations with shabby schooling facilities, perceived lack of economic opportunity, cost of living, corruption, housing and a sense of not being listened to. At times those protests triggered violence – with thousands of shops in France alone being damaged or looted in recent weeks – and police firing stun grenades and water cannons.
This weekend they also brought real change – student-led protests culminated in the toppling in an election of Serbia’s long-time leader Aleksandar Vucic after nearly two years of demonstrations against perceived corruption and creeping authoritarianism.
“Waking up, the first thing we felt was certainly a sense of relief and freedom,” said student protester Stasa Piletic. “Personally, I feel a sense of victory. I feel that we finally moved from protests to responsibility.”
Chiara, a 21-year-old student in protest-hit Milan, believes “it’s vital to take part in people’s spontaneous movements born from an explosion of rage that made collective action possible.”
“I think the worst damage this ruling class has done to my generation is stealing even the ability to imagine a future, to dream,” she said.
She said Italian students were confronting a reality of schools without enough teachers and crumbling buildings.
“And all of this with the prospect of an underpaid job which we didn’t qualify for and the prospect of living in a tiny, overpriced house, probably away from our city, which we didn’t want to live in.”
Protests led by Gen Z have caused ructions globally as the generation born roughly between 1997 and 2012 found its voice, from Bangladesh in 2024 and Nepal in 2025, to India this year. Now Europe has become a focal point.
Rising prices and the cost of living are a concern for 40% of 16-30-year-olds, according to a European Union survey published in 2025.
Among the 92.7 million people in the EU who faced the risk of poverty or social exclusion in 2025, the highest risk was recorded for young adults aged 18-24 years, at 26.3%, while the lowest was recorded for adults aged 65 years or over, at 18.8%.
Younger people are also wary of shouldering the financial burden of an older generation that tends to vote in greater numbers. People over 60 in France make up a quarter of the population but own 60% of France’s wealth, according to the OFCE think tank.
French pensions are by far the biggest public expense, on track to reach 14% of economic output, as the population ages and voters resist raising the retirement age or reducing benefits. That is still less than Greece or Italy, which spend the largest proportion of national income on public pensions among OECD countries, at around 16% of GDP, according to OECD figures in 2025. But it is much more than Australia, Chile, Iceland, Ireland or South Korea, which spent less than 4% of GDP on public pensions, according to the OECD.
Bilal Narjissi, a 17-year-old high school student in a suburb north of Paris, has been protesting against “deplorable” conditions and staff shortages at his school. “There used to be rats,” he said. Students were evacuated last year when a roof collapsed on the courtyard, though no one was hurt, he said.
Protests showed “that young people in Europe are united”, he said, adding, “we all agree on one point: that young people are treated like children, far too much, and that they aren’t listened to enough.”
A French government report in October said pension spending had risen by 2.5 percentage points of GDP between 2000 and 2023 while that for education had declined 0.5. It also showed 32% of the education ministry’s budget went towards pensions, crowding out money for other areas.
Gourdel, too, has been protesting for better conditions in schools in Belgium.
“We tried to do it passively. Nobody heard us. It’s only when people started to burn trash or that kind of stuff that the media and cameras started showing us,” she said.
The protests are still spreading, with a demonstration planned in Germany this weekend over cost of living, inequality, war and the state of schools.
Unrest has also hit Albania, where student-led demonstrations against Prime Minister Edi Rama’s government, fuelled by anger over perceived corruption, a lack of jobs and poor education standards, engulfed Tirana and spread to other cities.
“Our Prime Minister spent 130 days not listening to us,” said Xyke Kurti, a 19-year-old architecture student.
“If you ask a student in Albania, ‘where do you see your future?’ Everyone says ‘outside this country’,” she said, arguing that at home, even if you have talent, someone with “connections is always going to beat you”.
Serbia’s student movement did what demonstrators in other European capitals can only dream of.
Now, though, comes the gritty business of governing – something neither the students nor their candidates have any experience of. Luka Stojakovic, another protester, brushes that aside. “We have seen where people with political experience have brought us.”
British finance minister John Healey said he would help most households with their gas bills by enabling those who use the least to pay less as part of his first budget which is due to be announced in full later on Wednesday.
Healey – who has promised to give “breathing space” to families hit by the high cost of living – said he would abolish standing charges which are fixed daily fees that cover the costs of connecting a home to a gas supply and are charged on bills regardless of whether energy is being used.
“Gas standing charges are unfair and outdated so I am scrapping them to give millions of households a bit of breathing space,” Healey said in a statement issued by the Treasury.
He will ask regulators to remove the charges – which cost £108 ($143.78) a year for the typical household on average – in 2027 or as soon as possible after that, the Treasury said.
The costs will be shifted to the price of gas consumed which could save 60% of account-holding households around an average of £45 on their annual bill, the statement said.
Healey said his budget would “draw a line in the sand on an energy policy that has failed British billpayers for years, letting extra costs on bills pile high and leaving households even more exposed to global shocks”.
Earlier this month, the government cut value added tax on electricity bills which surged following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and have risen again due to the Iran war.
Previous governments have imposed a price cap on energy prices and removed other levies.
Despite that, Britain’s regulated domestic price cap rose 4% in October, and some forecasts are predicting a rise of around 20% to over £2,000 pounds a year in January for an average domestic energy bill including electricity.
British households pay a standing charge on electricity bills which costs around £200 a year on the current price cap.
A un lado del sofá, a primerísima hora de la mañana del martes, la actriz Andrea Ros (Terrassa, 33 años). Al otro, aunque no dejarán de acercarse, tocarse y reírse juntas, Sandra Sánchez (Talavera de la Reina, 45 años). La primera, además de aparecer en series y películas como [REC]2, Zorras o A mil kilómetros de la Navidad, es divulgadora perinatal y cocreadora del podcast La vida secreta de las madres. Sánchez no solo ganó la primera medalla de oro del karate en unos Juegos Olímpicos, es que lo hizo en Tokio, capital del país donde nació este arte marcial, y en 2021, con 39 años. Además, es bicampeona mundial, siete veces campeona de Europa y en aquel 2021 logró la triple corona del tirón: europeo, mundial y Juegos Olímpicos. Ahí queda la hazaña. Y están juntas porque Ros da vida a Sánchez en Karateka, de Aritz Moreno, que se estrena este viernes.
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