DraftKings Is Using AI to Supercharge the Harms of Online Behavioral Advertising

Online sports betting company DraftKings is using AI to target customers who are most likely to place losing bets and respond to gambling promotions. This kind of targeting is a form of online behavioral advertising, which is when companies personalize the ads they show you based on the data they’ve collected about you. The more data a company has, the more personalized the ad can be. While DraftKings is using AI to supercharge the harmful effects of online behavioral advertising, EFF has long argued that all behavioral advertising should be banned. According to the New York Times, DraftKings is using its customers’ betting records to train a machine learning model to find losing gamblers. Once found, DraftKings sends these customers targeted advertising designed to lure them back to the site to place more bets—bets that DraftKings thinks will be losing ones. DraftKings has a business incentive to keep losing gamblers coming back to their site, because these are the users actually maki