The popular football application spied by fans via the phone microphone to catch the hacking bars of the game streams

The Spanish data protection agency has fined La Liga, the country's leading professional football league, 250,000 euros ($ 283,000) for using the league's phone application to spy on its fans. With millions of downloads, the app would have been used to monitor bars in order to catch establishments playing unlicensed TV games.

The La Liga application provides users with schedules, player rankings, statistics and league news. He also knows when they watch games and where.

According to the Spanish newspaper El País, the league told the authorities that when its detected applications were users in bars, the applications recorded audio data using telephone microphones. The applications would then use the recording to determine if the user was watching a football game, using technology similar to that of the Shazam app. If a match was played in the vicinity, the officials would then be able to determine if that bar was licensed to play.

Thus, not only did the application spy on the fans, but it also turned them into unconscious narcotics. El Diario reports that the application has been downloaded 10 million times.

Although La Liga admitted that the application was registered on users' phones, the League insisted that the users had the option of not allowing the app to track the phone's location and to access to the microphone. The league told El Diario that the app automatically converts audio into a code that is not stored or listened to by employees.

The application's service conditions explain that the bug is optional:

If you accept the specific and optional box enabled for this purpose, you consent to access and use the microphone features and standby features of your mobile device, so that LaLiga knows from which place football is broadcast and thus detects any fraudulent behavior of an unauthorized establishment. Activating your mobile device's microphone and basket will require your prior acceptance of our pop-up window.

The legal notice states that this feature is only used to detect La Liga broadcasts.

However, the data protection agency ruled that La Liga did not properly inform users, thus violating their privacy, according to El País. The agency fined the La Liga for violating European laws on confidentiality and confidentiality of data, and ordered the league to abolish the application by June 30.

The league has become notoriously aggressive against illegal streaming in recent years. In 2017, La Liga launched an anti-piracy campaign, soliciting the help of Facebook, Google and Twitter, as well as the use of an exclusive tool to search the Internet for illegal flows on the Internet .

La Liga plans to continue to use its fans in this fight against piracy. According to El País, the league issued a statement in which it announced that it would appeal the sanction, saying that the data protection agency had not made the effort to understand the technology of the application.