A class action lawsuit filed against the Washington Post alleges the paper collected private data through secret surveillance to price gouge customers, Mediaite reported.

The complaint, obtained by Mediaite, says The Post surveilled its subscribers without their knowledge or consent.

"Rather than rewarding loyalty, The Post’s system converted Subscribers engagement into leverage against them," according to the complaint.

"Longtime Subscribers would end up paying more than new customers simply because the company knew more about them," the complaint alleges.

The Post only revealed its surveillance pricing following a disclosure law New York passed in 2025.

Prior to the law, "not a single subscriber was aware of their surveilled pricing or secret harvesting of their data," the complaint reads.

"We are hearing from people each week and as the case moves forward we may add new plaintiffs," said Tim Giordano, an attorney representing the plaintiffs.

According to the complaint, no version of the Post’s privacy policy disclosed how much of a subscriber's data was being harvested, from what sources, how long it had been collected and how it was being used to determine pricing.

"While many consumers may understand that free services, such as social networking and search sites, may gather information from users to pay for the service, a reasonable consumer would not suspect that a paid news site, like The Post, would gather this information from its Subscribers in order to increase subscription prices for certain Subscribers," the complaint reads.

The lawyers told Mediaite that the class action lawsuit could cost the paper billions of dollars in damages.

Giordano told Mediaite that 10% of subscribers were charged more by the surveillance pricing and all renewed annually.

Under that calculation, the past four years of subscribers could potentially incur damages of $1.5 billion, Giordano said.

"The Post's deeply invasive practice of consumer surveillance is squeezing consumers for all they've got through a campaign of deception, rigging the cost of services against the very people keeping these companies in business," Ryan Clarkson, another partner in the firm, told Mediaite.

"Consumers did not agree to be surveilled, they did not knowingly sign up to be charged a different amount from their neighbor to read the same newspaper," Clarkson added.

"Discriminatory pricing systems have no place in a fair market, and they need to be dismantled," he said.

The Washington Post did not respond to a request for comment from Mediaite.