Friday view: Does NSA scandal unveil new security concerns?

Leaks claim NSA and GCHQ compiled data en masse from mobile gaming apps, but will this hit customer demand and how genuine are the concerns?

This week has seen both the US National Security Agency (NSA) and the UK’s Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) accused of compiling data by targeting “leaky” smartphone applications, with some gaming apps and companies named in reports.

Details published by The Guardian indicated that Zynga apps had been some of those targeted in particular owing to a partnership it shared with Millennial Media, a mobile advertising company that offered its ad platform to other gaming app developers and brands.

The leaks have received huge press attention and brought into question people’s trust in applications that request data. Gambling apps, now designed to harvest particular data for CRM purposes could, in theory, pose as ideal targets for such snooping.

While the NSA has claimed that the methods have only been used “against valid targets”, the agency is estimated to have spent in excess of US$1bn in targeting smartphone applications for data retrieving practices.

What has not been reported, of course, is the extensive security measures required just to get a mobile gambling application on the market and operators have undertaken security measures similar to those adopted by banks and other financial institutions.

Clive Hawkswood, chief executive of the Remote Gambling Association, said that customers should be able to take comfort from this very fact.

“Even if organisations like the NSA/GCHQ could find some way to legally access data held by online gambling companies, it’s hard to imagine any information that we might hold which wasn’t already available to national intelligence agencies,” Hawkswood said.

Charles Cohen, CEO of mobile gambling operator Probability, added the scandal had been “blown completely out of proportion” and concluded that operators had no reason to make any changes to their security measures.

While the leaks remain pertinent for other sectors, any attempts to link them to mobile gaming appear to be tentative at best. As long as operators have maintained security measures that align themselves with licencing guidelines, then there’s little – if anything – to worry about. The trick is making sure consumers know this.