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

2 news reports Synced from source · record last edited 31 Aug 2026

In brief

An AI system built and deployed by Sky Betting & Gaming, Hestview Ltd and 1 other allegedly harmed Sky Betting & Gaming customers with gambling disorders, RTM (recovering problem gambler) and 3 others.

Risk domain
Privacy & Security Compromise of privacy by obtaining, leaking or correctly inferring sensitive information
Occurred
Coverage
2 reportsJan 2025 - May 2025

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

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.

Laws that address this harm

Policy angle: Classified under Privacy & Security (Compromise of privacy by obtaining, leaking or correctly inferring sensitive information) in the MIT AI Risk Repository taxonomy; 5 recorded instruments address this use case.

Matched from the record's risk domain and country to the instruments recorded here. A reviewer can correct the match in the repository (data/external/incident_overrides.yaml).

News reports (2)

Titles link to the original publisher; report text is not reproduced here.

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

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

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
—
Sectors
—
Countries
—

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)

  • 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)

  • 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

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

    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)

  • 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 editors or by text similarity in the source dataset.

Incidents in the same risk subdomain

All incidents in this subdomain

Source record: incident #1428 on the AI Incident Database · all 2 reports