La Liga turned fans’ phones into pub spies
Spanish football league fined for secretly using app to locate bars showing matches without paying
SPAIN’S football league has been fined €250,000 (£222,000) for using fans’ mobile phones as spying tools to crack down on bars screening matches via pirated television signals.
Using its app, La Liga would remotely turn on the microphone function of users’ phones to listen for the sound of a broadcast match. The geolocation function was then able to establish the whereabouts of the person watching a game to check whether they were in an establishment with a paid subscription to an official La Liga package, or if it was an illicit signal.
Spain’s data protection agency issued the fine after finding that up to 50,000 La Liga users’ phones had been used for the purpose.
The agency ruled that La Liga had committed a “very serious data protection infringement” by failing to adequately inform users that their app could activate the microphone.
If the scheme to crack down on venues screening games had been carried out legally, it would have needed to tell users every time their microphones were switched on, which would have meant an in-app notification being sent to people once every minute while they watched the match.
The in-app spying function appeared to have paid dividends for La Liga, as it was able to file 600 criminal cases against Spanish bars and restaurants.
La Liga has said it loses €400 million (£356million) a year in television royal- ties, and that half of Spain’s 120,000 establishments showing La Liga do not buy the hospitality package.
La Liga calculates that of these 60,000 bars and restaurants, twothirds use a pirate signal while the remainder simply use the signal from a domestic television package, which costs a fraction of the price.
According to a La Liga investigation last year, it is common for several bars in a neighbourhood to share a signal from a single pirate decoder.
In an official reaction to the ruling on Tuesday, La Liga said it would challenge the decision through the courts.
La Liga said that more than four million users of its app in Spain “express proactively and twice over” their consent for the use of their mobiles for the detection of fraudulent behaviour from unauthorised establishments.
But in a decision that calls into question the way users of digital services give permission for the use of personal data, the Spanish data protection agency AEPD took issue with the app’s one-off system of consent, suggesting instead that La Liga should have warned users each time it activated the espionage function.
La Liga had attempted to quash privacy complaints, saying the technology was “designed to exclusively generate a fingerprint of sound that contained just 0.75 per cent of the information gathered, making it technically impossible to interpret voices or human conversations”. La Liga said it was not spying on users, arguing that the listening technology consisted of an algorithm similar to the music-detecting app Shazam, which identifies popular songs. La Liga’s app breaks ambient sounds into a binary code that automatically compares the sound of the broadcast, with no data being recorded or stored.
“We could not record conversations even if we wanted or if a judge ordered us to, not even if they were related with the piracy that we are trying to pursue,” an IT specialist from La Liga said.
La Liga said it will discontinue using the technology from the end of the month, although it said this was merely the end of a contract with the supplier, and not due to AEPD’S decision.