Sara Geoghegan
Role at the time: Director of EPIC's Consumer Privacy Program and senior counsel, in an emailed statement
Statement summary
Sara Geoghegan, director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center's Consumer Privacy Program, told Dispute Index that a business model that profiles users with their personal information for targeted advertising is inherently exploitative, that programmatic advertising using sensitive personal data is predatory, and that a human person must be responsible for the resulting harms.
“Programmatic advertising that processes users' sensitive personal data is predatory and a human person must be responsible for the very real harms that real people are suffering due to these predatory practices.”
Read the full email
This business model in which users' personal information is collected and used to profile them for targeted advertising purposes is inherently exploitative. Programmatic advertising that processes users' sensitive personal data is predatory and a human person must be responsible for the very real harms that real people are suffering due to these predatory practices.
Geoghegan sent this statement by email in reply to a Dispute Index request for comment to EPIC about allegations that DraftKings' AI-selected promotions exploit vulnerable gamblers. She identified herself as director of EPIC's Consumer Privacy Program and senior counsel. The link is to her EPIC staff page; the statement itself is not published there. The text is reproduced as sent.
Archived copy (opens in a new tab)Why we used this label
Relative to DraftKings' promotion and targeting of at-risk gamblers, Geoghegan calls profiling-based targeted and programmatic advertising exploitative and predatory and says a person must be held responsible for the harm. She was responding to a request about DraftKings and speaks about the practice generally rather than naming the company, so we labeled it Condemned.