Silo is such a complicated show that even its showrunner gets confused sometimes. While filming the final seasons of the Apple TV sci-fi thriller, Graham Yost remembers two instances where he messed up details: once it was an actor who realized that a conversation they were about to shoot should’ve already taken place, the other involved the Japanese localization team pointing out that a subtitle didn’t match what was going on onscreen. In both instances, the problem was ultimately fixed, but Yost’s reaction was the same: “Oh shit, you’re right.”
Technology
Maryland moves to ban surveillance pricing in grocery stores
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You grab a box of cereal off the shelf. Your neighbor grabs the exact same box at the exact same store on the exact same day. She pays less. You pay more. Why? Because the store’s algorithm decided you would.
That scenario sounds like a conspiracy theory. It isn’t. Retailers have been quietly using this kind of pricing for years, and now one state has finally had enough.
Maryland is set to become the first U.S. state to ban surveillance pricing in retail grocery stores and certain grocery delivery platforms. Governor Wes Moore has said he will sign the Protection from Predatory Pricing Act into law after the state legislature passed it, and the rule will take effect on October 1, 2026.
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WHAT HACKERS CAN LEARN ABOUT YOU FROM A DATA BROKER FILE
Maryland is set to ban surveillance pricing at grocery stores, targeting a practice critics say lets retailers charge shoppers different prices for the same item. (SDI Productions/Getty Images)
What is surveillance pricing and how does it work?
Surveillance pricing goes by a few names: dynamic pricing and personalized pricing are the common ones, but the concept is the same regardless of what you call it.
A store collects data on you as an individual shopper. It looks at how often you browse certain products, what neighborhood you live in and whether a competitor is nearby, what your income and family size appear to be, and your dietary habits. Then it uses all of that to decide how much you specifically are willing to pay and charges you accordingly.
One Kroger shopper in Oregon decided to find out exactly what her grocery store knew about her. She submitted a data request under a state privacy law and received a 62-page profile in return. Most of the inferences in that profile were wrong. That’s the part that should make your stomach drop. Retailers are charging people based on guesses, and those guesses are frequently inaccurate.
Why Maryland is moving to ban surveillance pricing now
The timing here matters. Maryland didn’t pass this bill in a vacuum. Major retailers, including Walmart, have been rolling out digital price tags on store shelves. Unlike paper tags, these electronic displays can update instantly. Pair that capability with predictive pricing software, and a store can change what you’re charged in real-time based on whatever the algorithm decides at that moment.
Governor Moore pointed to the financial pressure already squeezing working families and argued that new technology should not become another tool for squeezing them harder. Consumer Reports actively lobbied for the bill, which speaks to how significant the consumer protection concern really is. Still, the organization was honest about the result: the final version of the law falls short of what advocates originally wanted.
What Maryland’s surveillance pricing law actually does
The Protection from Predatory Pricing Act sets some clear ground rules for large grocery retailers. Stores must keep their prices fixed for at least one full business day. That eliminates the possibility of prices spiking by the hour based on demand signals or individual shopper data.
Retailers are also prohibited from using surveillance data, shopping history, ethnicity or income to set different prices for different customers at the same time.
Loyalty programs and promotional offers are still allowed. That exemption was a concession to the retail industry, and it’s one of the places where critics say the law starts to lose its teeth.
RETAIL PRICES CAN JUMP IN SECONDS WITH HIGH-TECH STORE PRICE TAGS
Digital price tags are replacing paper tags in Walmart stores, allowing retail prices to change instantly with new technology. (Kurt “CyberGuy” Knutsson)
Surveillance pricing is already happening online
Brick-and-mortar surveillance pricing gets most of the attention, but the same issue shows up in online grocery shopping.
Consumer Reports ran an investigation into Instacart’s pricing practices last December. Nearly 400 shoppers purchased the same basket of groceries from the same stores at the same time. The price differences were striking. Depending on the product, shoppers were paying up to 23% more than other shoppers for identical items. Across a full year of shopping, those gaps could add up to more than $1,200 per household.
After the investigation went public, Instacart announced it was ending the program responsible for those discrepancies. That outcome matters. It shows that consumer pressure and public scrutiny can drive real changes, even before a law requires them.
Which states could follow Maryland’s surveillance pricing ban
Maryland may have moved first, but it won’t be alone for long. California, Colorado, Illinois, New Jersey and other states are exploring similar legislation, while New York has already enacted a related pricing transparency law.
What happens next in those states will be telling. Advocates are hoping they avoid the exemptions that weakened Maryland’s version. Each new bill is an opportunity to close the loopholes the retail industry has worked hard to create.
Consumers have been subject to dynamic pricing in airlines, rideshares and e-commerce platforms for years. Grocery stores represent something different, a daily necessity where price manipulation hits people with the least financial flexibility the hardest.
What this surveillance pricing law means for you
No matter where you live, this law matters to your wallet. If you shop in Maryland, the change is immediate. Starting October 1, 2026, you have a legal right to the same shelf price as every other shopper who walks in that day, regardless of what data the store has collected on you. If you shop anywhere else in the country, pay attention because your state may not be far behind. California, Colorado, Illinois, New Jersey and other states are exploring similar legislation, while New York has already taken steps toward pricing transparency. The momentum is real, and Maryland just handed those states a working template to build from.
10 THINGS TO STOP PAYING FOR TO SAVE MONEY NOW
A new Maryland law targets stores that change the price of products based on consumers’ data. (Douglas Rissing/Getty Images)
That said, wherever you shop right now, the exemptions in Maryland’s law are worth understanding. The Maryland Retail Alliance pushed hard against this bill and successfully carved out several exceptions during the legislative process. Consumer Reports flagged one irony in particular: loyalty program prices are exempt, which means stores could shift pricing in ways that favor members and potentially disadvantage non-members, effectively punishing non-members rather than rewarding members.
The enforcement side is also limited in ways that should concern any consumer. If a retailer violates the law, you cannot sue them yourself under these specific provisions of the law. Only the Maryland Attorney General has that authority. And before the AG can take action, the retailer gets a written notice and a 45-day window to correct the violation with no legal consequences. First-time violators face fines of up to $10,000. Repeat offenders face up to $25,000 in fines.
For a major grocery chain generating hundreds of millions in revenue, those fines barely register.
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Kurt’s key takeaways
Maryland’s law is imperfect, and advocates said so publicly. But an imperfect first law still moves the needle. It establishes that surveillance pricing in grocery stores is a problem worth legislating, gives other states a legal framework to improve on, and puts retailers on notice that the political appetite for regulation is growing. The bill’s weaknesses are actually useful in that way. They show exactly where the next round of advocacy needs to focus: stronger enforcement, consumer standing to sue, and tighter language around loyalty pricing exemptions. And if you live outside Maryland? Watch what your own state legislators do next. The grocery industry will lobby hard to add the same loopholes everywhere. Knowing what those loopholes look like is half the battle. Change tends to start in one place before it spreads. Maryland went first. Your state could be next.
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If a retailer already holds a 62-page profile on you and most of what’s in it is wrong, do you trust that the same technology is setting your prices fairly, and would you even know if it wasn’t? Let us know your thoughts by writing to us at CyberGuy.com.
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Copyright 2026 CyberGuy.com. All rights reserved.
Keeping everything straight is one of the big challenges of working on such a complex series, and as Silo enters into its final two seasons, the challenge has only increased. So it’s a good thing Yost has a team working alongside him looking for those mistakes. “It’s a lot to keep track of, but everyone is pitching in,” he says, “and I love this sense of collaboration.”
Season 3 of Silo starts streaming on July 3rd, and it expands the story’s scope quite a bit. The series follows the lives of the residents of a huge underground bunker hundreds of years in the future. The silo is home to 10,000 people who essentially live in a vertical city, one divided into layers that each have their own jobs and cultures, from the mines at the bottom to the government up top. The only way to navigate the silo is through a massive spiral staircase that goes from top to bottom, creating a very physical form of class division.
Initially it seemed the residents were the last remnants of humanity living in a postapocalyptic wasteland. But over the course of the first two seasons, it became clear that they lived in but one silo of many, each housing their own communities while isolated from the rest. Season 3 adds a new wrinkle: showing how the world came to be this way in the first place, a process that starts in a world that looks much like our own.
The season 3 premiere constantly jumps back and forth between the bleak future where we’ve spent the last two seasons and our present day, when the decisions were made that led to everyone being trapped inside of underground bunkers. Things are already complicated as the show picks up from last season — protagonist / silo mayor / reluctant revolutionary Juliette (Rebecca Ferguson) has just become the first person to venture between silos and is now suffering from memory loss — and the multiple timelines only ratchets that up.
“It’s a lot of pieces you’re trying to put together.”
The cast of Silo all have different techniques for dealing with this challenge, which becomes even harder given that scenes are rarely shot in chronological order. For some, daily team meetings with directors can be an invaluable tool. “A lot of days, we’d start the day with story time, and the director would go through where we’re at, where we just came from, what happens next,” explains Alexandria Riley, who plays newly promoted authority figure Camille Sims in the show. “It’s already a complicated story anyway, but then when shooting out of order, you do get a bit foggy.” Ferguson notes that the hair-and-makeup team can be particularly helpful in tracking the story, as they need to be on top of things like scars and burns to maintain consistency. Every detail counts. “The little changes that you do have enormous ripple effects going forward,” she says.
“It’s a lot of pieces you’re trying to put together,” adds Common, who plays Camille’s husband Robert on the show. “It is our job to know where we are, but thank god we had support, too. There are times when I’d have to talk to Alex about something just to be reminded.” The two actors even had separate rehearsals together to make sure they had everything down.
Others took a different approach. Jessica Henwick, for instance, joined the main cast as the present-day investigative reporter Helen in season 3, and says that “I didn’t read any scenes except my own. Because I’m a fan of the show, I wanted to preserve that experience. I will watch season 3 as a fan and see what happens. I don’t know what happens except in our storyline.” (Henwick is such a fan that, soon after she was cast, she had a single goal in mind: “I went to the set and explored the stairs.”)
Image: Apple
One thing that doesn’t help much, however, is delving into the source material. Silo is based on a trilogy of books by author Hugh Howey; the first two seasons explored the first book, while the final two will wrap up the rest of the story. But much has changed in the adaptation as the TV show attempts to both make Juliette a more visible figure in the central part of the story and update some of the plotlines to reflect present day concerns like AI.
“I started reading the books and realized very quickly that that wasn’t going to help, because the books are so different,” explains Ashley Zukerman, who plays a congressman in the present day storyline. He says that keeping both the novels and the TV show in his mind at the same time wouldn’t be helpful and instead found “that reading the whole scripts and then finding a way to forget [what his character wouldn’t know] was useful.”
With two seasons to go, Silo is racing toward a conclusion as it attempts to wrap everything up. Yost says that four seasons was always the plan, so the process has been figuring out how to fit everything into a set number of episodes. But since the final two seasons were filmed back to back, it also means that the Silo team are done having to worry about keeping all of those complicated plotlines straight. And as much as she says she’ll miss the experience of working on the show, there is one thing Ferguson is excited to be done with beyond memorizing storylines.
“I fucking hated running up and down those stairs,” she says.
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You found the flight, booked a hotel, and gave them your name, passport details and everything else they asked for. At this point, most of us close the laptop and start counting down the days.
But nobody warns you that the moment you hit “confirm,” your trip stops being only yours. Just this spring, hundreds of thousands of travelers learned the hard way what happens when the personal details you share with those companies get out (and how easily they get out).
Some got a scam text quoting their real hotel and check-in date before they were even told their information had been stolen. If you’ve got a trip on the calendar, this is worth ten minutes.
TRAVEL MISTAKE PUTS PHONE, LAPTOP AND STREAMING ACCOUNTS AT RISK
A single summer travel booking can hand over your name, contact details, trip dates, payment information and even passport data. (Neil Godwin/Future via Getty Images)
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What a single booking hands over
A travel booking may look like a routine form, but it can collect enough personal details to map your trip and your life back home.
- Full name
- Home address
- Phone and email
- Travel dates
- Payment details
- Passport number
Individually, none of it feels alarming. Together, it’s a complete snapshot of who you are, where you live, and when you won’t be home. That is the kind of profile scammers dream of.
How scammers use that data
A criminal who knows your hotel, dates, and confirmation number can send a message that looks exactly like it’s from the hotel: “We couldn’t process your payment. Re-enter your card to hold your room.” It may not feel like a scam. It feels like a headache you want to clear up before your trip. It gets personal, too. If a scammer knows you’re traveling and knows your family, they can call an elderly parent (or you) with a “grandchild stranded abroad” emergency that lands because the timing and names check out.
Trusted travel companies can still expose your data
If your first thought is, “But I only book through trusted companies,” you are not alone.
So did everyone caught in the breaches below. If a single careless business were the problem, I’d just warn you to steer clear of it and call it a day. Unfortunately, it’s more of an industry problem. And the size of the company doesn’t protect you, because the weak point usually isn’t the company itself, but the chain of partners behind it. So you can do everything right and still have your details slip out through one hotel employee’s infected laptop.
Over the past year, the travel sector has been hit again and again.
- Booking.com (April 2026). The world’s largest travel platform warned that “unauthorized third parties” accessed reservation data: names, emails, phone numbers, and details like customers’ hotels, dates, and confirmation numbers. No financial data was taken, and the break-in came through hacked hotel staff. The chilling part: scammers sent travelers WhatsApp messages quoting their real booking details, some before the official breach notice even arrived.
- Amtrak (April 2026). A reported Amtrak data exposure involving more than 2.1 million customer accounts. The exposed information included names, email addresses, physical locations, and customer support records. That kind of data can make a fake “problem with your trip” email feel personal enough to click.
Scammers can use stolen reservation details to send fake hotel, airline or booking messages that look surprisingly real. (Felix Zahn/Photothek via Getty Images)
- Carnival (June 2026). Carnival confirmed a breach affecting nearly 6 million people after a social engineering attack on a single user account. Some exposed data may have included names, contact details, dates of birth and government-issued ID numbers. For cruise customers, that creates an opening for fake trip alerts, identity-verification scams and phishing messages that sound much more believable.
- KLM and Air France (August 2025). A third-party customer-service platform was breached, exposing names, contact details and frequent-flyer numbers, which is plenty of material for a convincing “there’s a problem with your flight” call.
GLOBAL SCAM CRACKDOWN LEADS TO 276 ARRESTS
Curious how exposed you already are? Run a free scan to see where your information is showing up online-results usually land within an hour. Get a free scan to find out if your personal information is already out on the web: CyberGuy.com.
How to protect yourself before your next trip
You don’t have to stop booking trips online, but you do need to make it harder for scammers to turn your travel details into a payday.
1) Verify every booking message directly
Treat every “problem with your booking” message as suspect, especially if it asks you to click a link, re-enter your card or confirm personal details. Instead, open the airline, hotel or booking site directly through your browser or app. You can also call the company using the number on its official website, not the number in the message.
2) Use a credit card or virtual card when possible
A credit card usually gives you stronger fraud protection than a debit card. If your bank offers virtual card numbers, use one for hotel and travel bookings. That way, if the card number gets exposed, you can shut it down without replacing your main card.
3) Turn on travel account alerts
Before you leave, turn on transaction alerts for the card you use to book travel. Also check the security settings on your airline, hotel and booking accounts. Use a password manager to create and store strong, unique passwords for each account. Strong passwords and two-factor authentication (2FA) can make it much harder for someone to break in, even if your email address or phone number leaks.
4) Don’t store your passport or card in travel apps
Saving your passport, ID or payment card may save a few seconds next time. But if that account gets compromised, those details become part of the damage. After your trip, remove stored passport information, old cards and any documents you no longer need in the account.
5) Set a family code word
A word only your family knows can stop the “stranded grandchild” or “relative in trouble” scam fast. If someone calls claiming there’s an emergency, ask for the code word before you react, send money or share information. That tiny pause can save your family from a very expensive mistake.
6) Shrink your data-broker footprint with Incogni
A travel breach becomes more dangerous when scammers can match it with your home address, relatives, phone numbers and other personal details sitting on data-broker sites. That extra information can help them make a fake hotel message, family emergency call or identity scam feel much more convincing.
You can try to remove your information yourself, but the process can be frustrating. There are hundreds of data brokers and people-search sites, and each one may have its own opt-out process. Even worse, your information can show up again later.
A data removal service can help by sending removal requests on your behalf and checking whether your information reappears. It will not erase every trace of you from the internet, but it can shrink the amount of personal information scammers can easily find and connect to your travel plans.
Shrinking your online data footprint before you travel can make it harder for criminals to connect your trip details to your home and family. (Al Drago/Getty Images)
Check out my top picks for data removal services and get a free scan to find out if your personal information is already out on the web by visiting CyberGuy.com.
Kurt’s key takeaways
Every travel booking bundles your name, address, trip dates and contact details into one valuable package. Once that information moves through hotels, airlines, booking platforms and outside vendors, it may not stay where you think it does. That is why stolen reservation details are so dangerous. Scammers can use them to impersonate your hotel, send fake payment alerts or target your family while you are away. Book the trip and pack your bags. Just verify messages directly, use a password manager, turn on account alerts and shrink the personal data brokers keep on you.
What extra step do you take before traveling to keep your personal information out of scammers’ hands? Let us know by writing to us at CyberGuy.com.
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Apple is working on a “revamped” version of its entry-level MacBook Pro that it could launch as soon as the first half of 2027, Bloomberg reports. The company is also testing four new iPad Pros that are set to launch in the spring with a focus on “internal improvements.”
The updated MacBook Pro, which will keep the 14-inch screen size, will have a design that’s “in line” with what Apple is planning for the touch screen MacBooks it also has in the works, Bloomberg says. Those new touch screen laptops are set to be released between “the end of this year and early next year,” and Bloomberg has previously reported that they will get a Dynamic Island-like pill at the top of the screen.
Apple last updated the base MacBook Pro in October with an M5 chip bump. The company is working on an M6 processor, and Bloomberg says that Apple “finished work months ago” a different base MacBook Pro upgrade that keeps the laptop’s present design and is scheduled to launch this year. Apple will quickly move to the M7 line in 2027, including new Pro and Max chips, Bloomberg previously reported.
As for the iPad Pros, Bloomberg says that they’ll retain 11-inch and 13-inch screens. Apple last updated the iPad Pro line last October with the M5 chip.
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