How bookies use AI to keep gamblers hooked

[The Buzz]

Industry "insiders" reveal in an article by The Guardian that artificial intelligence is being used to predict behavior in ‘frightening new ways’ despite condemnation from MPs and campaigners. Nothing earth-shattering here, but always interesting to see the mainstream media's take on subjects like this.

Excerpts from the article:

Current and former gambling industry employees have described how people’s betting habits are scrutinised and modelled to manipulate their future behaviour.

“The industry is using AI to profile customers and predict their behaviour in frightening new ways,” said Asif, a digital marketer who previously worked for a gambling company. “Every click is scrutinised in order to optimise profit, not to enhance a user’s experience.”

“I’ve often heard people wonder about how they are targeted so accurately and it’s no wonder because its all hidden in the small print.”

Users unwittingly consent to the use of their data in ways they aren’t aware of due to lengthy terms and conditions, enabling their information to legally be used in this way.

“Once someone has logged into a gambling platform it can do whatever they want with them,” said Brian, a digital marketer for the gambling industry. “It’s like a science, it’s not just random advertising messages, the whole thing is personalised, and data-driven customer profiles are constructed from gamblers’ behaviour.”

Despite condemnation from MPs, experts and campaigners, such practices remain an industry norm.

“You can buy email lists with more than 100,000 people’s emails and phone numbers from data warehouses who regularly sell data to help market gambling promotions,” said Brian. “They say it’s all opted in but people haven’t opted in at all.”

Read the entire article here: https://www.theguardian.com/technolo...d-insiders-say

[Sherlock]

Another Guardian bullshit. Totally expected. My experience is that bookies have a problem to keep sites alive. To handle the big data means that they have to have by order(s) of magnitude more HW. They still can not work with the big data as any corp does not know what to do with the big data (yet). Bookies (I talked to) even do not profile players by affiliates. But yeah, I clearly see how they have nothing to do, just they want to store gigabytes of data of every players movement of a gambler.

To mix some bullshit big brother threat of AI with the practice of selling emails is low.