Spain’s football league has been fined £222,000 for using fans’ mobile phones as spying tools to crack down on bars screening pirate TV matches.
La Liga remotely switched on microphones in devices belonging to people who had downloaded its official app, to listen for the sound of a game being broadcast in a pub.
It then used a geolocation function which pinpointed where the person was.
Checks were carried out to establish if the venue had a paid subscription to a La Liga package or if it was piping in an illicit signal.
Spain’s data protection agency slapped the league with the fine after learning up to 50,000 La Liga users’ phones had been hijacked.
The agency ruled La Liga committed a “very serious data protection infringement” by failing to adequately inform users that its app could activate the microphone.
The Trojan horse app allowed La Liga to file 600 criminal cases against Spanish bars and restaurants.
The football body said it loses £356million a year in TV royalties and that half of Spain’s 120,000 establishments showing its games don’t pay for an official TV package.
According to a La Liga investigation last year, it’s common for several neighbourhood bars to share a signal from a single pirate decoder.
La Liga said it would challenge the decision in court. The body claimed that more than four million app users in Spain “proactively and twice over” gave consent for their mobiles to be used to track down pirates.
But data protection agency AEPD suggested La Liga should have warned users each time it activated the espionage mode.
An IT specialist from La Liga said: “We could not record conversations even if we wanted or if a judge ordered us to.”
League chiefs insisted the listening technology used a similar algorithm to music-detecting app Shazam, which identifies songs for users.
La Liga said the technology would be discontinued from the end of the month as its supplier’s contract ended.
