The application of the Spanish football league intercepted listening to users during the anti-piracy campaign

La Liga, the best professional football league in Spain, has been fined € 250,000 ($ 280,000) for violating users' privacy after the league's official app has activated the microphones on their mobile phones, reports El País. The application spied on users for the purpose of identifying bars that broadcast pirated streams of football matches.

Spanish users download the app to get schedules, scores and other information about football matches. But the app also included a feature designed to help the league identify sites that broadcast streaming football matches without paying the appropriate license fees.

The application would use the GPS sensor to determine if the phone was located in a bar or other place likely to broadcast football broadcasts. If that was the case, the application would listen to the audio of a game protected by copyright. If a bar was caught watching a match without a proper license, the league could demand that the bar be paid.

The application has been downloaded more than 10 million times, according to Reuters.

The European Data Protection Agency has ruled that technology violates the privacy of users. But according to El País, La Liga insists that its application complies with the Spanish laws on the protection of privacy and is considering appealing this decision. The league says that the application clearly informs users of the functionality and gives them the opportunity to opt out. The league also said that the application is carefully designed to avoid violating the privacy of the user.

La Liga "says that the technology used is designed to exclusively generate an audio footprint," reports El País. "This fingerprint contains only 0.75% of the information, the remaining 99.25% being ignored, so it is technically impossible to interpret or record voice or human conversations."

According to the league, this means that it is not possible to determine the identity of the speakers identified by the application nor to reconstruct what they said.

In any case, the league announced that it would remove the anti-piracy feature at the end of June.