Four days after B.C.’s information privacy commissioner gave a cautious thumbs up to the security of the province’s online gambling portal, BC Lotteries Corp. (BCLC) announced a partnership that expands some of its offerings beyond the province’s borders for the first time.
BCLC’s PlayNow.com and Loto-Québec's Espacejeux.com portals said Friday that they have linked together to allow British Columbians and Quebecers to play online poker against each other.
It gives British Columbians access to a bilingual platform with eight varieties of poker.
Espacejeux became the second government-regulated online gambling site last December – following the launch of B.C.’s PlayNow last June.
The partners promoted the new partnership with a February 20 tournament with $100,000 in prize money yesterday.
The Quebec and B.C. lottery corporations are basing the revenue-sharing formula for poker earnings on each jurisdictions gaming volume.
Also last week, B.C.’s Information and Privacy Commissioner Elizabeth Denham released a final report on a July 15, 2010, incident in which PlayNow was shut down after BCLC discovered that hackers could gain access to customers’ private information.
The incident occurred on the same day as the site’s launch.
The commissioner identified a number of areas where the online site’s security was inadequate.
The investigation determined that the cause of the breach had been fixed and security elsewhere on the site improved.
Denham nonetheless recommended a number of ways that BCLC could further improve the site’s security.
In the fiscal 2011 budget released last week, the B.C. government said its total revenue from the site was down 4.7% from projections in the 2010 budget thanks to reduced consumer spending on lottery games and casino gambling.
?In the budget, BCLC is projecting moderate annual growth in gambling revenue of 3.4% - much of which, said BCLC, will stem from continuing development of PlayNow.