Interactive PERSONAL DATA PROTECTION
tomers. Many data policies, worded by lawyers, state that the sites will ‘do their best’ to keep per- sonal data secure. They say that nothing is 100 per cent secure, but they’ll do their utmost to prevent a breach - well, in the casino sector, where cus- tomers want to know that they can really trust a site with their money and their data, the lawyers may be protecting the company with language, but players won’t put their trust in this kind of practice.”
Transparency can, Mr. Tanner outlines, be as much of an incentive to participate with a brand as bonuses and extra rewards. “Online you don’t have the physical attributes that make your game different,” he states. “The slots are the same from website to website, the random luck of the roulette wheel is the same. Many sites offer the same bonuses, matching the player’s first £50 etc., which is why, especially in online gaming, transparency of data, building that trust with a player, can be used to differentiate your site from the competition.”
“Latanya Sweeney, director of
the Data Privacy Lab at Harvard University, has shown that
roughly 87 per cent of people in the US can be uniquely
identified by the combination of
just three facts about them - zip code, age and sex.”
shared, or sold to third-parties, something that is frequently done across other business sectors.”
According to Mr. Tanner, good data practice should be like a nutrition label, pointing out to the con- sumer in an easily digestible way the key points of the privacy policy of the operator. Having a pol- icy and making it easy to understand are two entirely different things. “We’ve all seen those incredibly long privacy agreements, which don’t really expect you to slog through pages and pages of fine print, but are just obfuscating the data usage,” states Mr. Tanner. “It doesn’t have to be like that and in fact the clearer you make the poli- cy the more a customer trusts the information they are given. You must explain what data is col- lected, what wagering history is stored, the types of purchases made and banking information kept, something that is straightforward and clear to understand.”
It’s not just making the data policy clear, but pro- viding incentives to share the data with the opera- tor that creates a win-win for both parties. Caesars Entertainment provides sharing incen- tives. They give back to the customer for sharing
their personal information, which in turn enables Caesars to offer a better service to the player. If, when you share information, the incentive pro- gramme is tailored to the offers that you like - for example, you stop receiving offers to share in the wealth of a Nigerian Diamond Factory and instead receive vouchers for Amazon, then the customer is better engaged, more likely to continue to share data and more trusting in the programme.
Mr. Tanner believes that operators can ‘get away with’ surreptitious practices for a certain amount of time, but over time this presents a vulnerability to the business. In areas of security, the storing of data has to be made transparent as breaches can pose all kinds of threats not only to the consumer, but to the business as well. Customers can get very angry if their data is not secure and especial- ly upset if they discover that all kinds of personal data has been gathered surreptitiously and is now public knowledge on the Internet. “The leaking of celebrity images on Apple’s iCloud recently has driven home the fragile nature of personal data security, making people much more wary of using these services,” says Mr. Tanner. “You also have to be careful when making half-promises to cus-
There’s an obvious advantage for bigger compa- nies to cross market to multiple channels, but how operators of both land-based and online gaming handle mobile data and locational data is critical to how they engage with their players in a responsible manner. “You have to be sensitive about how you use the data gathered,” says Mr. Tanner. “Knowing where someone is, for exam- ple, gives lots of insights into them. It is not the business of casinos, but if you know a person is currently located on the fringes of Las Vegas, you can make assumptions about those activities. Another issue relates to the specificity of the data gathered. Caesars deals only in information in the realms of the casino, but in gathering this data you also begin to know a great deal about eating habits, room preferences, entertainment choices, which start to form narratives about players. If you further supplement that information, taking into account social media information, wealth and health data, it becomes harder to simply restrict the knowledge about a person to gaming specific details. If you buy information from out- side sources and combine the data with your own, the profiling is no longer gaming specific but gen- eral and very personal.”
Mr. Tanner believes that transparency is the best policy. He advocates that operators should overt-
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