iGaming Business magazine iGB 111 July/Aug | Page 101

iGB Live! Spotlight
market and inform gamblers of offers, etc. In other words, they
were not built with potential responsible and conscious gambling
applications in mind.
The gambling industry indeed sees the potential of such
transparency, mainly in increasing consumer trust and enhancing its
image. Social media platforms such as Facebook and Google make
data available for users to download although, unlike gambling, there
is not yet a mental disorder associated with the use of social media.
Gambling operators are still hesitant to do this – some are worried
about data protection and, also, the potential to reveal their strategies
and user base in case these data are aggregated for a number of
gamblers and analysed by competitors.
Do you think the Gambling Commission’s recent criticism of
the industry and its forthcoming GamStop system because
it doesn’t share data between marketing and responsible
gambling systems could prompt operators to be more
forthcoming with their data?
In our EROGamb project, funded jointly by GambleAware and
Bournemouth University, we advocate fair sharing of these data
for the two objectives. Indeed, the GDPR is a step in that direction
in emphasising the rights related to automated decision-making,
including profiling and the right to data portability. This will allow
gamblers to ask for their data and the way these are being used
to profile them, and also to stream these data to them and their
authorised parties, including responsible gambling personnel
and software. We are advocating real-time streaming of these data
so that a timely decision can be taken by responsible gambling
personnel, algorithms and applications.
GamStop is just one of many initiatives/projects aimed
at responsible gambling. Is the proliferation of such
projects in some way confusing the picture in your opinion?
If so, how could stakeholders work better together?
Such diversity is understandable and healthy at this initial stage
until we elect best practices. There is a lack of standardisation anyway
in the way online gambling is structured in terms of operators’
information technology architecture and what they capture and
how they store it. This makes it very difficult to have a unified scheme
and cross-operator applications. It also seems that IT experts in
the gambling industry would need to be more involved in training
about the potential reform of their systems to support responsible
gambling. There seems to be a difference in the terminology used
in the different divisions in the gambling industry, making it even
harder to communicate in an efficient style.
Stream: iGB Live! HQ
Area: Elevator
Panel: 
The EROGamb Project
When: 18 July@11:00
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