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Spanish Football League Defends Phone 'Spying' (bbc.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: Spanish football league La Liga has defended the privacy policy of its app after admitting it was accessing the microphone and GPS of Android users. It said it had been trying to track down venues illegally broadcasting matches, by matching audio data and phone location. The app, downloaded more than 10 million times on the Google Play Store, has been criticised by fans. La Liga said it wanted to "protect clubs and their fans from fraud." The broadcasting of football matches in public places without a paid licence cost the game an estimated 150 million euros ($177m) a year, it said. The new function was enabled on Friday, 8 June.
This may have been asked before, but isn't this a form of an illegal wiretap? I do not think an EULA would cover domestic or international spying by a corporation even with support of police.
Huge privacy violation if nothing else. With the EU's strict privacy laws, if listening in on your users randomly is not illegal, it sure ought to be. I hope La Liga gets punished where it hurts, with massive fines.
This really isn't OK. I don't like apps like Facebook, but what La Liga is doing listening in on a microphone to me is a way worse violation of privacy. I hope La Liga gets kicked in the nuts over this, make an example of them.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
Well, nothing to worry about except identity theft, fraud, burglary, car theft, extortion, the physical safety of yourself and your family, misinterpretation of innocent data by governments, employers, insurers and other financial services...
But sure, nothing to hide, nothing to fear. Right. Good luck with that.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Data plan on biggest Spanish carrier is 15 Euro for 1.5 GB. Or 1 Euro per 100 MB. That's probably about the size of the sound samples which would need to be transmitted back each month.
(10 million devices) * (1 Euro/mo) * (12 months/year) = 120 million Euros a year.
So the value of the data bandwidth they stole to do this monitoring is probably within an order of magnitude of the purported losses due to piracy. If they want to pay you to run this app to help their anti-piracy monitoring, that's not a problem. But secretly eavesdropping and stealing bandwidth is unethical if not downright illegal.
Surely this must violate the terms of the European GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation). I can't see it being legal to harvest personal information to speculatively trawl through for whatever ends.