If you gamble online, you might be gambling in more than one way. It's not surprising to me, but many online gambling businesses are located in places where the legal protections are more relaxed than in other places. However it's not just the laws around the games themselves, but also the laws around data protections.
Whether or not you have any sympathy here, or you think that companies engaged this this activity are worse than others, consider the fact that more and more companies in general are ignoring, flouting, or just failing to keep up with data protection laws in other countries. What's even worse, in my opinion, is that many of our laws are ill suited to dealing with the digital world and often don't provide any protections for data that is more accessible, and greater in scale, than that which has ever been available.
I have rarely known about data law changes, and have found myself ignorant of the laws in other countries at times. Not because I am looking to avoid any compliance, but because I'm too busy to keep up. I suspect many data professionals are in the same situation. We are unaware of problems in our data handling until there's a complaint or someone notices.
Privacy is important to many people in the world, despite the fact that all too often people aren't sure how they would define the rules of privacy for their data. It's a complex subject, and I understand the problems of passing or updating laws when various companies, advocacy groups, and even friends of lawmakers have opinions. I don't know how things may evolve over time, but I do suspect that privacy and data handling will become more of a part of data professionals' jobs in the future.
Steve Jones
The Voice of the DBA Podcasts
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