La Liga have been fined for using the microphone and GPS systems on the phones of 50,000 users of their official application to “spy” on bars not paying royalties to show matches.
The Spanish Agency for Data Protection have reportedly fined La Liga 250,000 EUR (222,712 GBP) for using La Liga’s official mobile phone application to access users’ microphones and GPS data to “spy” on them.
Spanish newspaper El Mundo report that La Liga used the microphones and GPS to capture sound and locate bars, restaurant and establishments which showed league matches without paying royalties.
La Liga used the microphones to detect commentary on their matches and then used the GPS to locate where the sound was coming from before checking if the bar the user was in at the time had paid for the rights to show La Liga matches.
La Liga reportedly recognised they used the application for this purpose in their description of the application and the Spanish Agency for Data Protection (AEPD) have been investigating the feature for a year.
The agency fined the league 250,000 EUR for using at least 50,000 Spanish phones for spying, saying that there had been an infraction of transparency about the use of the microphone when users were using the application.
La Liga, run by Javier Tebas, reportedly do not see a problem with their actions and have released a statement saying they “deeply disagree with the AEPD’s interpretation and believe that the agency has not made an effort to understand how the technology works: it doesn’t record, nor store, nor listen to conversations”.
The statement added that “for the microphone functionality to be active the user has to grant their express consent proactively and on two occasions, which means La Liga cannot be attributed with lacking transparency or information about this function.”
The league claims to have always fulfilled the requirements of the General Register of Data Protection (RGPD) and the Spanish Data Protection and Guarantee of Digital Rights Act (LOPDGDD).
They claim the technology they use is “designed to exclusively generate a fingerprint of sound which only contains 0.75 percent of the information, making it technically impossible to interpret voices or human conversations. This fingerprint becomes a hash code which cannot be reversed into the original sound.”
El Mundo report that La Liga will appeal the fine and the league claim they lose 400 million EUR (356 million GBP) per year to piracy.
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Story By: Alex Cope, Sub-Editor: Joseph Golder, Agency: Golder’s News And Sport
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