Spanish Football Association receives AVG fine for listening in with a microphone
The Spanish Football Federation has been fined 250,000 euros by the regulator for breaching the GDPR. The union listens with the microphone to app users to detect illegal football streams, but would not be transparent enough about this.
The La Liga football association used the smartphone microphone of users who downloaded the app to listen to the ambient noise. This was done specifically to listen to whether a user was in a bar and whether an illegal football stream was being played there. According to the Agencia Española Protección Datos, the Spanish privacy watchdog, La Liga violates European privacy legislation with the feature. It would not be clear enough to users that the app is listening in and it is too difficult to revoke permission for it.
In the ruling, the AEPD says that it is not clear to users when their data is collected. This is said to be due to “the way mobile phones work”, meaning that users cannot remember well enough that they ever gave the app permission to use the microphone. According to the privacy watchdog, the app should therefore show every time when the microphone registers sound in the background. The AEPD also criticizes the fact that it is too complicated to withdraw consent.
The La Liga app has been installed more than ten million times in Spain, although the listening was only done on Android. The app was downloaded four million times on that platform. The union made no secret of its use of the controversial eavesdropping method; it said that last year in an open letter.
La Liga disagrees with the fine, the union writes in a comment. The union believes that the AEPD has not sufficiently studied the technology, that users have twice given explicit permission for data collection, and that it has always cooperated in investigations and adheres to local regulations. The union also says that the app only makes a fingerprint of the ambient noise, which ‘consists of only 0.75 percent of the data’. “The other 99.25 percent is thrown away, making it technically impossible to even interpret voices or conversations.” The union is appealing the fine. It was also planned to remove the listen-in function completely from the app later this month.