Federal Ban on Behavioral Advertising Needed Now

I'm writing as a constituent to urge you to sponsor and pass federal legislation banning all online behavioral advertising in the United States. The recent case of DraftKings using AI to identify and target customers most likely to place losing bets illustrates exactly why this is urgent. They're not just showing ads—they're deploying machine learning to exploit vulnerable people based on their browsing data. This isn't an outlier; it's the logical end point of allowing companies to collect and weaponize our personal behavior. EFF has long argued that piecemeal solutions—like restricting third-party data sharing—won't solve this problem. DraftKings uses "first party data" they collect directly from users, which means policies only focused on data brokers miss the core issue. What we need is 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 supercharges fraudulent actors, letting them reach exactly the people most vulnerable to their schemes. And as AI enters the equation, companies are incentivized to collect even more data—since AI operates as a black box, developers keep gathering everything hoping something will train the model. This is about more than privacy. It's about protecting people from predatory exploitation. When companies profit from tracking our behavior to sell us things, what's good for advertisers becomes actively harmful to targets. Please join other lawmakers supporting comprehensive behavioral advertising bans. We need federal legislation that breaks the track-profile-target cycle before AI makes it impossible to control. Thank you for your attention to this matter.