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Privacy Android

Spanish Football League Defends Phone 'Spying' (bbc.com) 86

Posted by msmash from the privacy-woes dept.
An anonymous reader shares a report: Spanish football league La Liga has defended the privacy policy of its app after admitting it was accessing the microphone and GPS of Android users. It said it had been trying to track down venues illegally broadcasting matches, by matching audio data and phone location. The app, downloaded more than 10 million times on the Google Play Store, has been criticised by fans. La Liga said it wanted to "protect clubs and their fans from fraud." The broadcasting of football matches in public places without a paid licence cost the game an estimated 150 million euros ($177m) a year, it said. The new function was enabled on Friday, 8 June.
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Spanish Football League Defends Phone 'Spying' More

Spanish Football League Defends Phone 'Spying'

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  • Guess how many uninstalls are coming? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    And enabling of Mock GPS positions.

    "Yeah, there's a pub in the Antarctic that's totally pirating your games.."

  • No problema (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    La deleta...

  • One of my favorite things. (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I love when people pretend that the full, purchase price of "pirated" material is what they "lost" due to piracy, as if every single person WOULD have paid, and paid full price, if they couldn't "pirate" it. Sure, you can make whatever argument you like about the importance of paying creators, intellectual property rights, and so on, but the idea that every single person who watched or listened WOULD have paid, and COULD have, had "piracy" not been an option is absurd. A better estimate might be the same

    • Your semi-desire to have it ("I kind of want it but not enough to pay for it.") is exactly part of the leverage built into the system to generate profits for authors that in turn drives innovation.

      In other words, the authors have the honor of denying you and your semi-desire. No, you don't get to take it under the sophistry that you wouldn't have paid for it.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by sjames ( 1099 )

        At the same time, they are being dishonest when they claim that everyone who pirated would have paid for it if piracy wasn't an option. In fact, many would have just done without.

      • No, you don't get to take it under the sophistry that you wouldn't have paid for it.

        He wasn't saying it's OK to take it. He's saying that some of the people who took it would have skipped it if they had to pay, so the actual losses are lower than reported.

    • the idea that every single person who watched or listened WOULD have paid, and COULD have, had "piracy" not been an option is absurd

      You're right it is. But a non-zero number would have paid for it.

      The legalistic interpretation that leaves no room for anything but market forces and uses political power and state violence to enforce rules that benefit them is not really something I can cheer for.

      When someone expends vast amounts of money to develop a product, who do you think it should benefit? You?

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by sjames ( 1099 )

        Apparently La Liga believes everyone's smartphone is theirs to do with as they please. Are they really any better than the people who violate their copyrights?

        • Apparently La Liga believes everyone's smartphone is theirs to do with as they please. Are they really any better than the people who violate their copyrights?

          So... as long as someone else is doing something bad, in your subjective opinion, it justifies whatever bad, self-serving behavior of your own?

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by sjames ( 1099 )

            What I'm saying is that people who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones.

            I am not streaming La Liga at all.

    • > I love when people pretend that the full, purchase price of "pirated" material is what they "lost" due to piracy, as if every single person WOULD have paid, and paid full price, if they couldn't "pirate" it.

      Agreed. If it was up to these assholes they would charge you for every eyeball / ear consuming content.

      So when I buy and watch a BluRay does that mean the rest of my family are now magically "pirates" since they consumed the content and never paid for it???

      Funny how piracy is never listed in the Ye

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • Why Cares? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    You're already using a shitty Android spyware device. Why would you expect any difference in pricacy from an APP running on it?

    Viva la Windows Phone.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Haha. The 3 apps remaining on the Windows phone app store don't spy on you at all.

  • GRDP .... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    The app, downloaded more than 10 million times on the Google Play Store, has been criticised by fans. La Liga said it wanted to "protect clubs and their fans from fraud." The broadcasting of football matches in public places without a paid licence cost the game an estimated 150 million euros ($177m) a year, it said. The new function was enabled on Friday, 8 June.

    And, I'm sure, spying on users to allegedly prevent fraud is fully compliant with the GRDP, right?

    Pretty sure nobody was told their location and au

  • Did they pay for the bandwidth? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Solandri ( 704621 ) on Tuesday June 12, 2018 @03:20PM (#56773590)

    The app, downloaded more than 10 million times
    [...]
    The broadcasting of football matches in public places without a paid licence cost the game an estimated 150 million euros ($177m) a year, it said.

    Data plan on biggest Spanish carrier [finder.com] is 15 Euro for 1.5 GB. Or 1 Euro per 100 MB. That's probably about the size of the sound samples which would need to be transmitted back each month.

    (10 million devices) * (1 Euro/mo) * (12 months/year) = 120 million Euros a year.

    So the value of the data bandwidth they stole to do this monitoring is probably within an order of magnitude of the purported losses due to piracy. If they want to pay you to run this app to help their anti-piracy monitoring, that's not a problem. But secretly eavesdropping and stealing bandwidth is unethical if not downright illegal.

    • Data plan on biggest Spanish carrier [finder.com] is 15 Euro for 1.5 GB. Or 1 Euro per 100 MB. That's probably about the size of the sound samples which would need to be transmitted back each month.

      Let's do the math. State-of-the-art audio codecs, such as Opus [xiph.org], can intelligibly store speech using as little as 0.7 Kb/s. The perceived quality at such rates is terrible, but it may be good enough for the purpose of fuzzy matching to a known broadcast signal. And the device doesn't need to be recording all th

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      Hate to defend them but it seems they are using an audio fingerprint, similar to Shazam or Google's music ID system. The amount of data transmitted is very small, certainly not 100MB. Since it's just frequency/time histograms I'd estimate it to be in the tens of kilobytes range max, probably less.

    • They could be embedding inaudible or maybe even audible sound bites into the background noise which can be detected locally on the phone, so the only bandwidth used would be sending GPS coordinates when a positive match is found. I'm not defending what they did, just giving you an alternative technical solution which doesn't require large bandwidth.

  • We all have had cases where technology was used to catch criminals. I'd love to find a way to do that without giving companies, governments, or individuals inappropriate powers. I remember working for a company that decided to push a custom update to their app to find a laptop that was stolen out of the office. That was kinda shady, but cool.

    Suppose the Spanish Football League went to the police, and got a warrant to capture the data, made the pap change temporarily, and sent the data to a responsible ag

  • Android Permissions says use Microphone.

    The EULA even says:

    3. USE OF THE MICROPHONE

    LaLiga will enable the microphone of your device, solely if you accept by checking the box enabled for this purpose or the pop-up window emerging in the APP, to find out if you are watching football matches. This information shall be employed to detect fraud in unauthorized public establishments.

    4. USE OF GEO-POSITIONING

    LaLiga can be aware of your location using geo-positioning on your mobile device only if you agree to the b

  • I don't see how this "protects" fans from anything. And to the extent that it's protecting the clubs, it's certainly not from fraud.

    Fraud is when you misrepresent something. Their complaint is that venues were broadcasting the real thing.

    • No, fraud is "wrongful or criminal deception intended to result in financial or personal gain", according to Google, and that matches my own undertanding of the term.

      The fraud is, for example, a bar is getting the stream of a Liga football match without paying the licensing fee to the Liga, and is then showing that stream on a big screen to bring in more customers who buy drinks.

      I'll play Liga's Advocate for a a minute, here...

      The Liga's argument is that this deprives the Liga of revenue, and assuming

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