Swedish gambling operators to be allowed to process personal data related to legal offences
The Swedish Gambling Act will be updated to incorporate new measures on the use of data.
Sweden.- The Swedish Parliament has approved changes to the Gambling Act of 2018 to allow operators to process customers’ personal data to detect legal offences. The move allows licenced operators to process data relating to legal violations “under certain circumstances”, including for the detection of criminal activity, the monitoring of suspicious betting, preventing match-fixing and enforcing legal compliance.
No motions were submitted in opposition to the move, which will be introduced from February 1, 2025. Licensees will be able to monitor gambling accounts for unusual betting behaviours and help authorities detect incidents of match-fixing and sports corruption.
Licensees must have detected illegal activity on the account in question in order to process the data. Under existing rules, operators must ensure that data processing is restricted to what is necessary for the stated purposes. The move comes after the Swedish government created a new data-sharing platform intended to help tackle match-fixing and corruption in sports.
Last month, Riksrevisionen, Sweden’s national audit office, delivered its report on the country’s gambling regulator Spelinspektionen. It concluded that the regulator needs to do more to monitor licensed gambling, but also suggested that the government needed to better define illegal gambling.
It found that the regulator has often not been effective enough to meet its objectives. One of the faults identified was a lack of inspections of licensees.
Spelinspektionen has reported that revenue from gambling in Sweden reached SEK6.66bn (€574m) in Q3. That’s a decline of 1.3 per cent year-on-year and the lowest total since Q1 of last year. The drop was due to a fall in land-based gambling revenue, particularly Svenska Spel’s land-based casino brand Casino Cosmopol, which closed two of its three venues at the start of the year.
