Interactive PERSONAL DATA PROTECTION
Who’s watching the watchers?
Harvard University’s Adam Tanner discusses the fascinating subject of personal customer data and its opaque usage by online gaming sites
As you’re reading this article, the smartphone in your pocket is telling third parties personal infor- mation about you. It’s part of a multi-billion industry concentrated on tracking, packaging and selling data. The data generated by apps and serv- ices you use on a daily basis, from geolocation and cookies to social-media tracking and credit card transactions. Everything is building records about you and your behaviour. This isn’t Big Brother from George Orwell’s 1984 - this is business.
As businesses gather freely available information about you, land and tax restoration, voter data, daily location and social media posts; a huge library of information can be gleaned, which is then sold to data aggregators and analysts so that they can accurately profile you. It’s an issue that affects every aspect of modern life - and is espe- cially interesting when it comes to gaming.
Adam Tanner of Harvard University studies data, specifically customer data and how companies use it. He investigates the data they collect from customers, to what ends it’s deployed and asks whether the outcomes for the customer are posi- tive or negative. Mr. Tanner’s most recent major
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case study involves Caesars Entertainment, both in the US and worldwide. He has examined the data channels mined by Caesars through the com- pany’s state-of-the-art loyalty programme.
Transparency is a broad theme within Mr. Tanners work, whereby he has looked at the choices open to the customer at the point of con- sumption. Do they have a choice as to whether they wish to share their data? If you go to a land- based casino you have the choice to join the loy- alty scheme or play anonymously, whereas in the online environment there’s no such choice, as the data is collected anyway. “You have to empower the customer into making choices driven by con- siderable benefits,” states Mr. Tanner. “If you gamble anonymously, then there are no perks and benefits, but if you empower the customer with the knowledge that if they share their data with the casino then they will be rewarded, players can make conscious decisions to be part of a mutuality beneficial programme. Just as airlines and supermarkets all want loyal customers and are hungry for customer data, casinos are in the same position. However, a company like Caesars must ensure that their customer data is not
Adam Tanner, Fellow, Institute for Quantitative Social Science, Harvard University
Customers can get very angry if their data is not secure and especially upset if they
discover that all kinds of personal data has been
gathered surreptitiously and is now public knowledge on the Internet.
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