The Clean Up Gambling organisation group has submitted evidence to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) detailing widespread illegality in how data is obtained and used for profiling by online gambling operators.

It is hoped that, given the ICO’s powers of audit, this evidence will help to shape an investigation on data abuse within the sector.

The complaint made by campaign group Clean Up Gambling to the UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office analyses tracking technology used by Sky Bet, an online gambling site owned by Flutter, the world’s largest gambling company, which also owns Paddy Power.

We are talking about addiction, people losing vast sums of money, and profiling being harnessed to exacerbate that. It’s not like selling garden tools on the internet. We are talking about something very, very addictive.

On SkyBet’s failure to obtain consent to collect sensitive medical data related to addiction, legal director of AWO Ravi Naik, which represents Clean Up Gambling, said: “None of our clients knew they were being profiled, let alone there were third parties involved.”