iGB Live! Spotlight
iGB Live! Spotlight
Raian Ali, EROGamb project
The project lead for Bournemouth University’ s EROGamb project says the gambling industry needs to become more willing to share data if it wants to show it is serious about responsible gambling iGaming Business: This year the UK industry suffered a huge blow with the FOBT maximum stake being cut to £ 2. Many have said the industry could have avoided such a drastic cut if it had acted more responsibly. Would you agree with that and what do you think it should do going forward to prove it is serious about preventing gambling harm and avoid further clampdowns? Raian Ali: There is a general view that gambling is a loosely regulated industry and with the rise in online gambling, challenges in regulating other involved disciplines such as artificial intelligence( typically used for profiling users and marketing) and security( typically involved for data protection and authentication), would add yet additional complexity. The maximum stake cut to £ 2 will be only a quick fix, as workarounds by gamblers will always be possible. We would expect further restrictions of this kind in the future, which may make gambling experience cumbersome to all. To avoid further restrictive measures, the gambling industry would need to build a more positive image by taking more proactive approaches, mainly in its transparency to gamblers, and by offering them measures and tools to be more in control of their gambling behaviour. In the end, measures such as the £ 2 would not be needed if gamblers were wellinformed and well-equipped to control their gambling independently.
What role does data have to play in this? Is it really the magic bullet? There does not seem to be a magic solution for problematic and addictive behaviours, unless the person involved is willing to change and participate in some sort of self-regulation. However, this should not mean other parties involved in the gambling experience are exempt from their duty of care. Unlike the alcohol and tobacco industries, online and machine-based gambling has an unprecedented capability to track personal consumption and communicate data and information about it to gamblers, their surrogate counsellors and intelligent software. Most importantly, this can happen in a real-time fashion, making their use more potent in a timely and relevant manner. Technology can be designed to enable gamblers to define and customise their problem gambling triggers, perhaps with the help of a mentor, so that they are aided through the use of some interactive and persuasive technology mechanics to stay within their limit.
“ We are advocating real-time streaming of gamblers’ data so a timely decision can be taken by responsible gambling personnel, algorithms and applications”
How are your efforts to get operators to share data with you progressing? What about their interest in the EROGamb project generally? We are currently relying on programming facilities publicly available from some online gambling operators to iteratively retrieve a gambler’ s betting history if they authenticate our application to do that. These facilities were initially meant to help third party gambling applications enrich the gambling experience, e. g. to compare the
98 iGamingBusiness | Issue 111 | July / August 2018