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 making DraftKings money. Unfortunately, those considered “problem gamblers” (people who repeatedly gamble despite harm to themselves, their finances, and their relationships) are highly likely to be targeted by this model. By re-engaging these individuals through targeted promotions aimed at keeping them on the platform, DraftKings is capitalizing on their vulnerability for profit instead of mitigating their risk. 

Predatory online behavioral advertising isn’t new, but companies’ use of AI to process data and target customers has magnified its harms. Online behavioral advertising incentivizes the collection of vast quantities of data to power ad tech. Adding AI into the mix means that even more data is collected to train and refine models. Because AI operates as a black box, the humans building the models can rarely predict which data points are the most useful to the AI, driving them to continuously collect more data. AI also allows companies to process enormous data sets much faster, and, as a result, supercharges the harms of online behavioral advertising. 

A direct consequence of online behavioral advertising is that it provides the data the surveillance industry needs to run. Data collected for targeted placement of ads is being sold to insurance companies, banks, and state and federal government law enforcement agencies such as CBP. ICE is also taking an interest in the data fueling ad tech: earlier this year, ICE published a Request for Information “seeking information to better understand how the industry’s commercial Big Data and Ad Tech providers can directly support investigations activities.”  

DraftKings seems to be using solely “first party data” to target their ads, meaning that they’re using only the data they collect directly from their users and are not buying any additional data from third parties to fuel their machine learning model. This highlights how policy solutions that only limit third-party data sharing and selling would not be enough to prevent these predatory advertisements. Rather, policymakers must ban online behavioral ads.   

What DraftKings is doing with their targeted promotions is just one example of how online behavioral advertising causes real harm to real people. But there are ways to take back control over your own data: EFF offers resources such as our Surveillance Self Defense project, along with other tips for how you can protect yourself on mobile apps and on websites.  

DraftKings’ use of AI to target losing gamblers illustrates how ad tech evolves and how companies find new ways to use our data against us. This is why EFF believes that all behavioral advertising should be banned. If companies can’t send personalized ads, they’ll have less incentive to collect the behavioral data powering them.