A New Opportunity for Responsible Gambling
Speed Read (Get the headlines here, and read on below)
Responsible gambling efforts focus on helping gamblers set limits for themselves and prevent them from encountering problems with gambling addiction.
Given the increasing exposure to sports gambling online and the vast threat landscape from the digital ecosystem there is an opportunity to educate a new generation of users.
As we saw with Secretary Hegseth’s phone number leaking and the connecting him to a Daily Fantasy Sports gambling site, it’s easy to make a mistake that can effect your life in the real world.
As financial institutions forge partnerships with Kalshi and perhaps others it’s important to educate users to keep their money, privacy, and identities safe.
Responsible gambling efforts are missing a real opportunity to help a large segment of sports gamblers and market predictors. Responsible gambling, or RG for short, is not doing enough and needs to be expanded to deal with the current threat landscape that everyday Americans face as the digital and physical worlds move closer together.
Responsible gambling initiatives are a part of every gaming experience in the United States. It is largely a term of art for tools that gamblers can use to prevent themselves from making decisions that might lead them toward the path to problem gambling. Whether it’s a poster in a bingo hall or casino, or that sped-through disclaimer at the end of a podcast ad for your favorite sportsbook, the reminders exist. But in some instances it can seem like a box simply being checked in terms of how sportsbooks think about RG. While efforts to help people make smart decisions with their gambling money are necessary, It feels like many efforts have become stagnant. Responsible Gambling programs and efforts need to adapt to the world we live in and educate gamblers about the threats they face in cyberspace and the steps they can take to protect their privacy and personal information.
The National Council on Problem Gambling bills itself as the “only national nonprofit organization that seeks to mitigate gambling-related harm.” It has advocacy toolkits, hosts training, and has an accreditation program for online gambling platforms, among other tools. But this approach is far too narrow and avoids an opportunity for sportsbooks to show their customers that they are investing in them as users. This is especially true as threats to safety and security increasingly span the digital and physical domains.
When you sign up for a digital sportsbook like FanDuel, or DraftKings, or even a prediction market like Kalshi, you are forking over a lot of valuable personal information about yourself. When you sign up for an account to bet with DraftKings, for example, you entrust the company with your email address, name, a physical address, and phone number. They also collect other information like your payment card or other financial account, driver’s license number, social security number, zip code, gender, age, and countless preferences from your phone use. And if you opt in to their social networking features, they also collect your photos and locations from your posts. Furthermore, if you elect to use their biometric verification when you create an account, they may use your facial image to verify your identity.
There is nothing nefarious about DraftKings or anyone else doing this. Plenty of businesses collect data on their users or customers for a variety of reasons. DraftKings is required to collect some of this data for tax purposes or anti-money laundering reasons, and I have no reason to think they play fast and loose, or anything close to that with your data. You can even request your data from them so you know what they know about you and how they might use it to target you as a user. And to go one step further, you can ask them to delete some of the data they keep about you. But we learned recently that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth used a betting platform called Sleeper.com. How did that information come to light? After news leaked that he used a secure messaging app to communicate with other senior national security officials, the German newspaper Der Spiegel was able to find Hegseth’s personal phone number on the internet. Der Spiegel then used that phone number to uncover several other accounts associated with that number, including the one with Sleeper.com.
So if the Secretary of Defense of the world’s largest military has trouble maintaining proper cyber hygiene, the young men most targeted by betting platforms surely need help. This is the perfect place to expand Responsible Gambling efforts to ensure the safety and security of users.
So where should sportsbooks and nonprofits start? First of all, let’s start with the business side of things. It wouldn’t surprise me to hear that some sportsbooks look at RG efforts as a sunk cost. But if you expand RG work to include educating users about how to keep themselves and their data safe on your platform and giving them tools to do so, they will see that you are investing in them and their safety. Moving beyond that, responsible gaming efforts should teach users about multi-factor authentication (MFA) tools to protect their accounts. Right now, the two largest digital sportsbooks, FanDuel and DraftKings offer multi-factor authentication, but DraftKings forces you to use an SMS text and FanDuel only allows SMS or an authenticator app. Neither allow for a more secure tool like a physical key or supports the use of passkeys, which are now considered by many to be more secure and more convenient. The second element that RG programs should advocate for is privacy tools. Digital bettors should know where to go in an app to prevent their phone number from leaking out, like what happened to Secretary Hegseth. They should know how to opt out of social media functions after they opt-in, or minimize location sharing or other sensitive data fields.
These efforts are even more important as Kalshi forges partnerships with Robinhood, Crypto.com, and other financial institutions. Banks do a pretty good job of reminding customers how to keep their accounts safe. They have a business incentive to do so as prevention is cheaper than remediation in the face of scams or fraud. The same incentives exist for sportsbooks and prediction markets, especially as they intertwine themselves further with each other. And just as prediction markets seek to disrupt the gaming and financial services industry, so too must we upend the notion of Responsible Gambling so it meets the needs of the modern day gambler.