I’ve been blogging about the roll out of the new online casino in British Columbia – PlayNow. While I’m a fan of online gambling and think that it should be legal but regulated to ensure fair play, I’m not a fan of the government that should be doing the regulating actually running their own casino. This takes away objectivity. The fox cannot guard the hen house.
But in British Columbia, it is becoming apparent that a government agency may not be prepared to do the job done by the professionals who run real online casinos. Within the first couple of hours of opening up, the government run PlayNow crashed. Now news has come out that the site may have been shut down because of a security breach.
Apparently by the time 134 players had registered with their new PlayNow accounts, 12 of them had had their information exposed to other players. This accidental data crossover switch some players accounts to other players accounts while play was going on. The site was shut down and the 12 players who were affected have been contacted so they can begin the tedious task of changing credit card numbers and protecting other data that was exposed.
The revelation of the security breach is already causing concern with Canadian players. Some are upset to discover that the government lied to them. That a fairly innocuous reason for the shut down – player overload was the one given to the public when the reality was a reason that caused much deeper concern – a security breach.
Apparently the number of players wasn’t as heavy as people thought, which means that those claiming the crash showed a serious gambling addiction among Canadians now have to rethink the issue. It’s not gambling addiction that caused the problem but a badly built and government run site. If the site was run by an outside agency, the government could take steps to censor it. But how does the government govern itself when it fails to protect the people it is meant to serve?