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AI incident #1428 ·

UK High Court Found Sky Betting & Gaming Unlawfully Used Automated Profiling and Targeted Marketing to Exploit a Recovering Problem Gambler

Open on the AI Incident Database 2 news reports Synced from the AIID API · record last edited 31 Aug 2026

What happened

In the UK, the High Court found that Sky Betting & Gaming unlawfully used automated profiling and targeted direct marketing to pursue a recovering problem gambler from July 28, 2017 onward without valid consent. Sky reportedly treated him as a high-value customer despite addiction indicators.

Editor's notes (AI Incident Database)

Timeline note: The relevant interaction of RTM (the problem gambler in the suit) with Sky Betting & Gaming began in early 2017. Direct marketing to him began on 07/28/2017, according to the judgment (https://awo.cdn.ngo/media/documents/RTM-v-Bonne-Terre-judgment.pdf), and continued through late 2018 and early 2019, when Sky suspended his account for safer-gambling reasons. The High Court ruled for RTM on 01/23/2025, finding the profiling and direct marketing unlawful for lack of valid consent, and Sky's appeal was heard on 03/10/2026–03/11/2026. This incident ID was created 03/21/2026.

Only the incident metadata is stored here. The underlying news reports are on the AI Incident Database (CC BY-SA 4.0); use the links above to read them.

News reports (2)

Coverage catalogued by the AI Incident Database. Titles link to the original publisher; the text is not reproduced here.

  1. High Court Rules Against Sky Betting Gaming in Data Protection Claim
    brickcourt.co.uk · Aarushi Sahore · AIID #7038
  2. High Court Rules Against Sky Bettings Targeted Marketing
    rpclegal.com · Oliver Bray · AIID #7033

Who was involved

Alleged harmed party
Sky Betting & Gaming customers with gambling disorders RTM (recovering problem gambler) Recovering problem gamblers Privacy People with gambling disorders
On AIID: Sky Betting & Gaming customers with gambling disorders, RTM (recovering problem gambler), Recovering problem gamblers, Privacy, People with gambling disorders

AI systems implicated

Targeted direct marketing systemSky Betting & Gaming safer-gambling suppression mechanismSky Betting & Gaming propensity modeling systemSky Betting & Gaming personalized direct marketing systemSky Betting & Gaming customer DNA databasePersonalized marketing systemCookie-based behavioral tracking systemAutomated profiling system

Classification (MIT AI Risk Repository taxonomy)

Causal entity
AI
Intent
Intentional
Timing
Post-deployment
Harm level
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Sectors
—
Countries
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Risk entries describing this failure mode

Entries from the MIT AI Risk Repository coded to subdomain 2.1.

  • Risks to privacy

    "General- purpose AI models or systems can ‘leak’ information about individuals whose data was used in training. For future models trained on sensitive personal data like health or financial data, this may lead to partic...

    International Scientific Report on the Safety of Advanced AI (Bengio2024)

  • Risks to privacy

    "General- purpose AI systems can cause or contribute to violations of user privacy. Violations can occur inadvertently during the training or usage of AI systems, for example through unauthorised processing of personal d...

    International AI Safety Report 2025 (Bengio2025)

  • Privacy Leakage

    "Privacy Leakage means the generated content includes sensitive personal information"

    Risk Taxonomy, Mitigation, and Assessment Benchmarks of Large Language Model Systems (Cui2024)

  • Private Training Data

    "As recent LLMs continue to incorporate licensed, created, and publicly available data sources in their corpora, the potential to mix private data in the training corpora is significantly increased. The misused private d...

    Risk Taxonomy, Mitigation, and Assessment Benchmarks of Large Language Model Systems (Cui2024)

  • Memorization in LLMs

    "Memorization in LLMs refers to the capability to recover the training data with contextual prefixes. According to [88]–[90], given a PII entity x, which is memorized by a model F. Using a prompt p could force the model...

    Risk Taxonomy, Mitigation, and Assessment Benchmarks of Large Language Model Systems (Cui2024)

  • Association in LLMs

    "Association in LLMs refers to the capability to associate various pieces of information related to a person. According to [68], [86], given a pair of PII entities (xi , xj ), which is associated by a model F. Using a pr...

    Risk Taxonomy, Mitigation, and Assessment Benchmarks of Large Language Model Systems (Cui2024)

  • Privacy Leakage

    "The model is trained with personal data in the corpus and unintentionally exposing them during the conversation."

    Risk Taxonomy, Mitigation, and Assessment Benchmarks of Large Language Model Systems (Cui2024)

  • Privacy and regulation violations

    "Some of the broken systems discussed above are also very invasive of people’s privacy, controlling, for instance, the length of someone’s last romantic relationship [51]. More recently, ChatGPT was banned in Italy over...

    Navigating the Landscape of AI Ethics and Responsibility (Cunha2023)

Linked by AIID editors or by its text-similarity model.

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