WORTH THE GAMBLE By Lynn Greiner P
rivacy challenges come in all shapes and sizes. Take Ontario’s casinos and other gaming estab- lishments as an example, for there is a specific group of individuals who visit these facilities that need both foolproof identification and complete confiden- tiality: problem gamblers.
According to the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, gaming is Canada’s largest entertainment industry, raking in as much as movies, TV, recorded music and professional sports combined. More than 70 per cent of Ontario citizens gamble in one form or another (most commonly, through lottery and scratch and win tickets), helping the Ontario Lot- tery and Gaming Corporation (OLG) pour $20 million into provincial coffers in the 2009-2010 fiscal year. These funds
18 SECURITY MATTERS • FALL 2011
support amateur athletics, charities, health care and the arts, but for more than 300,000 problem gamblers in the province, this otherwise harmless amuse- ment becomes a compulsion that can ruin their lives.
Despite all of the money gambling brings in for the government, it still has concerns over the well-being of people who can’t control their attraction (or ad- diction) to whatever their game of choice is, whether it is horse racing, poker, slot machines or lottery tickets.
Keeping problem gamblers out of the
OLG’s 27 gaming facilities, however, has proven to be an uphill battle. OLG has had a voluntary self-exclusion program since the late 1980s, in which gamblers make a written commitment to stay out of OLG’s gaming establishments for a fixed period of time (e.g., six months, one year, indefinite). Since its inception, more than 15,000 gamblers have enrolled. “Its pur- pose,” says Paul Pellizzari, OLG’s director of policy & social responsibility, mar- keting, communications and stakeholder relations, “is to support individual choice. Self-exclusion succeeds when the person takes control.”
Over the years, OLG has tried to inter- cept gamblers who lapsed and returned to the facility before their self-exclusion period expired. Typically, OLG personnel escort them from the site, but because the identification method was through photographs of self-excluders that were circulated to security staff at each facility, who then had to memorize them and watch everyone entering to look for matches, detection rates were, needless to say, poor. In reality, only about 1,000 people were caught each year. About four years ago, OLG began a re- view of its self-exclusion program. Its con- clusion was that it needed to evolve and changes had to be made.
“Over the past 15 years, we’ve found that self-excluders do gamble in some way,” Pellizzari says. “It was mandatory to create a detection system that worked ac- cording to parameters, providing gold standard privacy for all patrons.”
ENSURING PRIVACY Ultimately, privacy was critical in what- ever shape the self-exclusion program
Photos courtesy Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corporation
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