As a society, we should take steps to prevent harms of all sorts, and that includes privacy risks for those who play and win the lottery, writes Rob Csernyik.Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press
Rob Csernyik is a freelance journalist and a 2022 Michener-Deacon fellow.
For decades, Canadians dreaming of lottery jackpot wins skipped a step in their fantasies. Visions of new homes and sports cars danced through their heads, not the 15 seconds of fame that come before cashing an oversized novelty cheque.
In Canada, not unlike other jurisdictions, winners posing for promotional photos or video clips after winning a government lottery is a rite of passage. Information such as full names, hometowns and amounts won is disseminated to the public. I could pull countless examples from the media – sometimes directly from lottery websites, for amounts as modest as $1,000 or $10,000 – but I’m not that unkind.
Lotteries have recently started rethinking the practice. Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corp. has announced it will no longer share the full names of lottery winners in news releases, using initials instead of last names. British Columbia Lottery Corp. started doing the same on Jan. 1. It’s a small change, but a big step toward improved privacy for winners. It needs to become standard practice across Canada, stat.
Recent media coverage of prize winners from Western Canada Lottery Corp., Atlantic Lottery Corp. and Loto-Québec, which cover the remaining provinces and territories, has continued to include winners’ last names.
OLG says winners have been asking for such a change over concerns of their information circulating online. It will limit use of winners’ full names to its website, and only during the 30-day period after prizes of $1,000 or more are collected.
When print and broadcast news were king, these reports were ephemeral. Yet in today’s saturated media world, they both get lost in the news cycle and live online ad infinitum. The old way of promoting winners, then, has diminishing returns for both sides.
Break out the tiny violin for the nouveau riche, you might say – but imagine for a second that you hold a golden ticket and can choose between partial anonymity or a lifetime of top search results as a lottery winner. This information is available to anyone with a web browser, from strangers seeking gifts or loans, businesspeople courting investors, salespeople of all stripes, even scammers and criminals.
In China, major jackpot winners have famously accepted prizes while wearing costumes to help mask their identities. No such luck in Canada, where aside from rare exceptions (such as someone facing a genuine risk of being kidnapped), winners must present themselves to the public. One Toronto lawyer told CBC News that he frequently gets calls from winners who want a low-profile method to collect their prizes.
If it seems like an overreaction, think again. Today we live in a culture where, for good reason, we take risk-management steps to protect our information online as laypeople, let alone newly anointed jackpot winners. The American College of Trust and Estate Counsel suggests the following precautions among others for lotto winners: arranging continuing security for family, reducing online footprints, installing home security systems, and getting new phone numbers and e-mail addresses that can be shared on a need-to-know basis. If this is what a leading legal organization considers smart protocol, it makes little sense for lotteries to publicize full names.
In the past, OLG had problems with people fraudulently claiming lottery tickets, which undermined public trust. It’s a government agency, so the public needs some degree of prize-winner transparency. Identifying winners and their locations can also help to detect fraud, since the information can indicate suspicious patterns. This is true for lotteries nationwide. The press strategy from BCLC and OLG is an improved version, a reasonable compromise between the needs for organizational transparency and individual privacy.
A next step, besides other lotteries ditching last names in press releases, is to start spiking other unnecessary information best kept from public view. BCLC, despite its move to last initials, still says on its website that it reserves the right to publish detailed information about winners, including their middle name, occupation, employer, marital status and “other personal information, as volunteered by winners during the prize claim process.”
Gambling can be a harmful industry in a variety of ways – from addiction to other offshoots. As a society, we should take steps to prevent harms of all sorts, and that includes privacy risks for those who play and win.
Granting more anonymity is a necessary modernization of a practice designed for the preinternet media age. Striking the right balance helps strengthen public trust in the system and ensure that the money can be life-changing in a good way for winners, rather than a headache.