Casinos are playing a dangerous game with customer data. As the operators find new ways to gather information on their customers, one analyst thinks there could be blowback against the industry if they don’t handle that information well.
Stacy Norris wrote in the latest volume of the UNLV Gaming Law Journal the piece “’ “…And the Eye in the Sky is Watching Us All’ – The Privacy Concerns of Emerging Technological Advances in Casino Player Tracking.” In it, she speculated that for an industry that depends on a consumer’s trust, in their games and ability to pay out, any case of mishandling player data could ruin that relationship for a very long time.
The article refers extensively to the U.S. constitution, laws and jurisprudence to determine the fine lines of what can and can’t be considered constitutional in tracking players. On the one hand, players have a right to privacy and a right to due process. While that would suggest that data collected by casinos could not be used against customers, the courts have cut out specific exceptions that might add up against a defendant, should the casino hand them over their data to prosecutors.
The bigger question is if customers will be ok with ever increasingly sophisticated ways of being tracked. The evidence suggests that they couldn’t care less. Facebook has been collecting oceans worth of data on 2 billion users worldwide, with more signing up every day.
She also notes that eye in the sky technology goes back to the 1960’s, although its much more sophisticated today. But so long as there is a value added by the security, and additional tracking seems set to do that, customers won’t mind the tradeoff. “For the facial recognition and biometric technology that casinos are entertaining for player tracking, security, and enhancement of customer experience, the comfort level of technology among existing consumers would seem to suggest an easy transition,” Norris concludes.
Advanced tracking is already making its way into casinos, and unless a sudden seismic shift in the public’s attiude to surveillance happens, everyone will be pretty ok with it no matter what happens.
