Spanish Football Association receives AVG fine for listening in with microphone
The Spanish Football Association has been fined 250,000 euros by the regulator for violation of the GDPR. The union listens with the microphone with 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 function. It wouldn’t be clear enough to users that the app is listening in and it’s too hard to revoke permission for it.
In the ruling, the AEPD says that it is not clear to users when their data will be collected. That would be because of “the way mobile phones work,” which prevents users from remembering 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 noise in the background. The AEPD also denounces 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 eavesdropping only happened on Android. The app was downloaded four million times on that platform. The union made no secret of the fact that it used the controversial listening method; it said in an open letter last year.
La Liga disagrees with the fine, the union writes in a response. The union believes that the AEPD has not delved enough into the technology, that users give explicit permission for the data collection twice, and that it has always cooperated in investigations and adheres to local regulations. The association also says that the app only makes a fingerprint of the ambient noise that ‘consists of only 0.75 percent of the data’. “The other 99.25 percent is thrown away, making it technically not even possible to interpret voices or conversations.” The union is appealing the fine. It was also already planned to remove the listening function from the app in its entirety later this month.