PHAI Drops Casino Data Lawsuit as Massachusetts Regulator Launches Researcher Portal

The Public Health Advocacy Institute (PHAI) has withdrawn its legal challenge against the Massachusetts Gaming Commission (MGC) after the regulator met its obligations under the state’s 2011 Expanded Gaming Act. The move follows the creation of a live application portal that gives qualified researchers access to anonymised behavioural data from the state’s three commercial casinos.

Legal Dispute Resolved

PHAI originally filed the lawsuit in July 2024, arguing that the MGC had failed to honour the data-sharing requirements set out in Section 97 of the Gaming Act. The organisation had first requested the data back in 2022, years after Massachusetts’ first casino opened in 2015 and all three properties were operational by 2019.

Section 97 mandates that the commission collect player-behaviour data from casino licensees, contract a nonprofit research entity to strip personally identifying information and certain game details, and then make that anonymised dataset available to approved researchers. The data is intended to support studies on gambling addiction development, evidence-based harm-minimisation strategies, and systems for monitoring high-risk gambling behaviour.

Data Now Accessible

After the suit was filed, the MGC acted swiftly. It contracted the University of Massachusetts in 2025 to store and anonymise the data, a process completed earlier this month. The portal now hosts a brief version of the player data dictionary, with the full dictionary provided to researchers upon approval.

The dataset covers player demographics, loyalty programme information, session durations, wager amounts, average bets, win/loss figures, jackpot activity, and game characteristics from all three commercial casinos.

Andrew Rainer, PHAI Litigation Director, said: “After PHAI filed suit against the Commission in July 2024, the Commission finally took the steps needed to collect player data from its casino licensees, to anonymise and store the data, and to make the data available to researchers.”

MGC spokesperson Thomas Mills stated that the commission has “worked diligently to create the framework to allow the anonymous transfer and analysis of the data by qualified researchers” since the onset of casino gaming in the state.

With the casino data dispute settled, PHAI is now turning its attention to sports betting. Executive Director Mark Gottlieb said his organisation wants a similar statutory obligation imposed on sports gambling operators, noting that “this kind of player data should now be collected from sports gambling companies, whose business in Massachusetts has exploded since sports gambling was legalised in 2023.” He pointed to Sen. Keenan’s Bettor Health Act (S.302) as a model for extending the data-sharing requirement to that sector.