The Public Health Advocacy Institute had filed a lawsuit against the Massachusetts Gaming Commission back in 2024

A legal dispute over casino player data in Massachusetts has come to a close after the state’s gaming regulator moved to satisfy requirements it had been accused of ignoring for more than a decade

The Public Health Advocacy Institute (PHAI) at Northeastern University filed a suit against the Massachusetts Gaming Commission in 2024, arguing that the agency had failed to meet obligations laid out in the state’s 2011 casino law. 

That legislation required the commission to collect detailed player behavior data from casino operators and make it available to researchers studying gambling addiction.

More than ten years after the state’s first casino opened, advocates said that access still did not exist.

PHAI director Mark Gottlieb said such data is essential for identifying which games or machine features tend to encourage harmful gambling patterns, information that could then guide changes to reduce that risk.

The organization withdrew its lawsuit earlier this month after the Commission began complying with the law.

According to Commission spokesperson Thomas Mills, the agency worked with the University of Massachusetts Amherst’s Donahue Institute to build a portal that allows approved researchers to request player data after personal identifiers have been removed. 

That system became available on July 10. Mills said the commission’s efforts toward this system actually began back in 2016, years before the lawsuit was filed.

“Since the onset of casino gaming in the Commonwealth, the Massachusetts Gaming Commission has worked diligently to create the framework to allow the anonymous transfer and analysis of the data by qualified researchers,” Mills wrote.

Gottlieb countered that the rollout would have moved faster had the state required casinos to submit data in accessible formats as a condition of licensing, rather than negotiating that after the fact.

He also pointed to a gap in current law: sports betting operators face no comparable data-sharing requirement.

A bill now before the Massachusetts legislature, the Bettor Health Act, would extend those obligations to sportsbooks as well.