26 Jul 2025
Do you have a license for that robot bookie?
previously: Big Tech platforms: mall, newspaper, or something else?, surveillance licensing in practice
The problem with big, do-everything state privacy laws is they have
oversized
impact on smaller and more honest companies, while the larger and
more criminally inclined have the lawyer budgets to just throw
compliance
paperwork at the problem. It’s time for a new approach
to state privacy laws: start with known surveillance harms and look for
places where the state has some leverage to address them. We need more, but
shorter, privacy laws.
I still think that eventually we’re going to have to come up with some kind of surveillance licensing scheme. If a slot machine needs a license, and a private detective needs a license, than a company that manipulates your habits like a slot machine and surveils you like a detective should need a license. But let’s not delay doing something positive just because we can’t get a general-purpose solution right away. A promising place to start will be with regulating surveillance related to businesses that are already licensed.
Read the whole thing: Smartphone
Gambling is a Disaster by Jonathan D. Cohen and Isaac Rose-Berman.
Mobile gambling apps must be licensed by the state, so every license
renewal is an opportunity to require disclosure of not just algorithms
used to boost engagement
within the app itself, but also the
advertising targeting practices used to promote the app.
Today, if you look up gambling brands like FanDuel Sportsbook
on Meta Ad Library, you can see the ad creative, but not the
decision-making criteria used to match an ad to a user.
And that’s a problem. We know from experience outside the USA that
the gambling industry uses a variety of approaches to seek out people
with gambling problems, and those at risk of developing a gambling
problem. Because one of the motivations for state gambling licensing
systems is to help prevent problem gambling, a requirement to disclose
targeting practices will not just help understand how the big
surveillance platforms work, but also address a known human
problem.icmyi: Following
legalization, sports betting spreads quickly, with both the number of
participants and frequency of bets increasing over time. This increase
does not displace other gambling or consumption but significantly
reduces savings, as risky bets crowd out positive expected value
investments.
And the knowledge gained from surveillance
advertising disclosure in one area will help inform future laws. Big,
top-down privacy laws don’t just have the problem that big evil
companies can adapt. They’re also working from inadequate knowledge that
could be filled in by smaller, more specific legislation. The problems
of how surveillance
advertising practices can be treated under the law are complex. We
need to re-focus how we approach state privacy laws: go after a real,
identifiable surveillance problem, make a difference, collect data, and
repeat.
Update 13 Mar 2026
Tonko,
Blumenthal Reintroduce SAFE Bet Act Addressing Sports Gambling This
bill would Provide that a sports wagering operator may not use
artificial intelligence to track the sports wagers of an individual;
create an offer or promotion targeting a specific individual; or create
a gambling product, such as a microbet.
(A promising start, but
would encourage platforms to use so-called privacy-enhancing
technologies to target cohorts of likely problem gamblers in an
obfuscated way.)
Bonus links
Facebook
ranks worst for online harassment, according to a global activist
survey Justine Calma. More than 90 percent of land and
environmental defenders surveyed by Global Witness, a nonprofit
organization that also tracks the murders of environmental advocates,
reported experiencing some kind of online abuse or harassment connected
to their work.
Texas
Is Getting Tough On Data Protection by Allison Schiff. As of now,
the Consumer Protection Division has initiated or resolved at least nine
major privacy and data protection lawsuits or settlements under various
Texas state laws.
Is
anyone left to defend trust and safety? by Casey Newton. Rolling
layoffs across Meta, Google, Microsoft, and other platforms have made
careers in trust and safety even more precarious, according to an
academic paper published this year. (Its title: The End of Trust and
Safety?) And as those workforces have diminished, platforms have also
rolled back policies that once sought to protect users against hate
speech, propaganda, and even weapons powered by artificial intelligence
— and some platform leaders, such as X’s Elon Musk, openly brag about
it.
Firefox is fine. The people running it are not by Liam Proven. (fwiw, some of my most-used extensions are replacements for stuff that Firefox took out)
Trump’s
AI Action Plan is a blueprint for dystopia by Brian Merchant. In
a particularly Orwellian segment of the AI action plan (and the thrust
of one of the three executive orders), the Trump admin proposes that, in
the name of free speech, words that it finds disagreeable, like “climate
change” and “diversity,” be banned from AI management frameworks.
Furthermore, AI services considered for federal contracts should be
assessed by the government for ideological biases—also to ensure free
speech is protected.
(icymi: research already shows Adverse
impacts of revealing the presence of “Artificial Intelligence (AI)”
technology in product and service descriptions on purchase
intentions. The more that AI
as a brand is identified with
the Trump administration, the more polarizing it will be. The AI
look in graphics already looks like it connects with pro-Trump
readers better than anti-Trump readers.)