Communications of the ACM
What a Gambling App Knows About You
Online gambling companies conduct extensive data-analysis work to identify their best customers, see how much those people are betting, and to try to predict what will get them to spend more.
Credit: Yoshi Sodeoka
When Gregg finally stopped gambling in late 2018, he was in a dire financial position. He had lost nearly $15,000 during a nine-month betting binge, on top of two outstanding loans totaling more than $70,000 and a mortgage of more than $150,000 on his small home in Britain.
Now he is on a hunt to know whether his favorite gambling app, Sky Bet, knew about his problems and still tried to hook him.
Records show that Sky Bet had what amounted to a dossier of information about Gregg. The company, or one of the data providers it had hired to collect information about users, had access to banking records, mortgage details, location coordinates, and an intimate portrait of his habits wagering on slots and soccer matches.
After he stopped gambling, Sky Bet's data-profiling software labeled him a customer to "win back." He received emails like one promoting a chance to win more than $40,000 by playing slots, after marketing software flagged that he was likely to open them. A predictive model even estimated how much he would be worth if he started gambling again: about $1,500.
From The New York Times
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