Gambling firms secretly sharing users’ data with Facebook which it uses to promote gambling
Gambling companies are covertly tracking visitors to their websites and sending their data to Facebook’s parent company without consent in an apparent breach of data protection laws.
The information is then being used by Facebook’s owner, Meta, to profile people as gamblers and flood them with ads for casinos and betting sites, the Observer can reveal. A hidden tracking tool embedded in dozens of UK gambling websites has been extracting visitors’ data – including details of the webpages they view and the buttons they click – and sharing it with the social media company.
By law, data should only be used and shared for marketing purposes, with explicit permission obtained from users on the websites in which the tools are embedded. But testing by the Observer of 150 gambling sites – including virtual casinos, sports betting sites and online bingo – found widespread breaches of the rules.
This weekend, Iain Duncan Smith, the Conservative chair of the all-party parliamentary group on gambling reform, called for an “immediate intervention”. He said: “The use of tools such as Meta Pixel without explicit consent seems wholly in breach of the law and should be immediately stopped. The gambling industry’s marketing practices are now out of control, and our regulatory structure and codes of practice are repeatedly shown to be inadequate. This cannot go on.”
Wolfie Christl, a data privacy expert who has investigated the ad tech industry, said: “Sharing data with Meta is highly problematic, even with consent, but doing so without explicit informed consent shows a blatant disregard for the law.
“Meta is complicit and must be held accountable. It benefits from facilitating problematic and unlawful data practices for its clients and systematically looks the other way, using its terms and conditions as a shield rather than seriously enforcing them.” [Continue reading…]