Mobile apps are designed to provide a more user-friendly, streamlined interface and are a safe counterpart to mobile websites. If you have downloaded a casino app from a regulated operator, then before accessing the slots and table games inside, you will have first encountered a system pop-up asking what has now become a very common question: “Allow [App] to access your location?”
Most people will have some kind of reflex aversion and instinctively go toward the “No” option. This is due to concerns over privacy. While it’s normal to expect apps telling us the weather or using navigation to require the user’s location, why would an online casino also need this? Why would an operator care if you’re sitting at home in London or sunning yourself on a beach in Spain?
Legality Geofencing
If you want to entertain yourself with some demo slots with no registration required, you could do it on websites like Legalbet which is a service focused on analysing UK gambling operators and their games and has a special page dedicated to free slot games.
But if you want to play real money games, then you could do it only at online casinos or on their mobile sites or apps. The gambling industry is heavily regulated, and the laws and regulations change depending on the territory. The UK Gambling Commission, for example, handles licensing for all of the UK, but operators licensed by the UKGC are prohibited from offering gambling services to players physically located in jurisdictions where the operators don’t hold a licence.
So it’s the legality of who an online casino app operator can accept bets from that demands the geofencing. The operator will set it up to only allow eligible players to access the platform, which saves them a lot of headaches and worries about illegal players.
Anyone attempting to circumvent this measure by using a VPN or a mock location app will still often run into a wall. That’s because casino apps don’t just look at the IP address; and instead use a more sophisticated “fused” location approach. An app will cross-reference multiple sources of data to help confirm location and look at things like GPS/GNSS data, nearby Service Service Identifiers (SSIDs), and can even seek verification by checking the signal strength from the local cell.
All of that information is collected by the phone’s operating system, and the multi-layered approach allows for (greater reliability and verification confidence than relying on GPS alone. But the user has to give permission for all of that to be passed on to the casino app.
Fraud Prevention
While protecting themselves and ensuring they abide by local gambling regulations, casino apps also use location services to proactively help in fraud prevention. When a player logs in to an app, the software will create a signature of that location, so the casino knows where they are playing from.
If most of a user’s traffic comes from Manchester, for example, but then suddenly there’s a login from Romania on that account and a high-stakes bet being placed, the casino app’s risk engine will flag that and probably freeze the account, all because of location services.
The Privacy Question
People have legitimate concerns about protecting their privacy while online, and it’s something that will crop up when an app asks for permission about anything, not just location. Because of meeting strict General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) obligations regarding data handling, processing, and storage, licensed “white listed” online casino apps are quite safe to use. By asking for location, all the app is concerned about is whether it gets a yes or a no. Compare that to unlicensed offshore apps, and it’s a very different story. They may misuse user data or lack adequate safeguards, increasing privacy risks.
The “No” Option
But what happens if you say no and don’t allow the app to access location services? Initially, a player could probably still open the app and browse through a catalogue of games. But upon making an attempt to open a real-money game or make an account transaction, technology will step in and prevent any further actions.
When a user selects “No” the operator can’t legally verify their presence in one of its licensed territories. So if the app can’t read location data, the server-side validation will fail. So a user can say no, but it will trigger restrictions because in the world of casinos, the location data is essentially the proof of legality, along with ID verifications, age and KYC checks.
