Spanish Football League app uses microphones and GPS to detect illegal broadcasting

11. June 2018

The official smartphone app of the Spanish football league (La Liga) can activate the microphone to search for unlicensed public broadcasts of league matches. Those responsible have admitted that the app activates the microphone during the league games in order to find out whether a public broadcast is taking place approximately to the smartphone. In addition, the app uses GPS to determine the exact location where the audio clip was recorded. If an unlicensed, public transmission is determined, the operators of the app receive a notification and can take action against those establishments.

Similar to other countries, Spanish establishments can only show pay-tv broadcasts of football matches in their restaurants with a special license. According to the league, unlicensed performances result in losses amounting to 150 million euros per year and the data obtained will only be used to fight piracy. With the help of the app the fans are to be acquired as “informers” in order to get to the scammers. The app is quite popular and was downloaded at least 10 million times.

The practice was revealed because of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) which entered into force on May 25th 2018. The fact that the microphone authorisation is used for this purpose had not been explained in the terms of use. It merely said that the microphone was used for analysis of the audience. Due to the GDPR, in the newly data protection declaration it says that the app tries to find out via microphone whether the user is watching football and is searching for fraud. However, users in Spain have the possibility to revoke the permission to access the microphone at any time (iOS and Android), but must do so in the settings of their smartphone.