1. United States
2. N.Y.
3. Letter

I'm writing as a constituent to urge you to sponsor and support legislation banning all online behavioral advertising in our state. The recent case of DraftKings using AI to identify and target customers most likely to place losing bets shows why this is urgent. They're deploying machine learning to exploit vulnerable people based on their browsing data. This isn't an outlier—it's what happens when companies can collect and weaponize our personal behavior. While some privacy laws exist at the state level, they fall short. DraftKings uses "first party data" they collect directly from users, which means policies only focused on data brokers miss the core issue. We need a straightforward ban on targeting ads based on online behavior: web searches, pages visited, apps used, geolocation, health tracking, and all the ways our devices document our lives. The harms extend far beyond gambling. Behavioral advertising creates a surveillance ecosystem where real-time bidding exposes personal information to thousands of advertisers and data brokers. It helps fraudulent actors reach exactly the people most vulnerable to their schemes. And as AI enters the picture, companies collect even more data—since AI operates as a black box, developers keep gathering everything hoping something will train the model. Several states are considering comprehensive consumer privacy laws. But if they leave behavioral advertising intact, they leave the biggest problem unsolved. What's good for advertisers becomes actively harmful to targets when tracking drives the system. Please support legislation that breaks the track-profile-target cycle. We need state action before AI makes it impossible to control. Thank you for your time and attention to this matter.