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Piracy Privacy

Popular Soccer App Spied on Fans Through Phone Microphone To Catch Bars Pirating Game Streams (gizmodo.com) 131

Posted by msmash from the extreme-lengths dept.
Spain's data protection agency has fined La Liga, the nation's top professional soccer league, 250,000 euros ($283,000 USD) for using the league's phone app to spy on its fans. From a report: With millions of downloads, the app was reportedly being used to surveil bars in an effort to catch establishments playing matches on television without a license. The La Liga app provides users with schedules, player rankings, statistics, and league news. It also knows when they're watching games and where. According to Spanish newspaper El Pais, the league told authorities that when its apps detected users were in bars the apps would record audio through phone microphones. The apps would then use the recording to determine if the user was watching a soccer game, using technology that's similar to the Shazam app. If a game was playing in the vicinity, officials would then be able to determine if that bar location had a license to play the game. El Diario reports that the app has been downloaded 10 million times.
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Popular Soccer App Spied on Fans Through Phone Microphone To Catch Bars Pirating Game Streams More

Popular Soccer App Spied on Fans Through Phone Microphone To Catch Bars Pirating Game Streams

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  • It appears you're watching a game at a bar that doesn't have a license to broadcast - I'm afraid I'll have to contact the proper authorities.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by torkus ( 1133985 )

      Also, that's your 5th beer in the last hour and you drove here. Disabling your vehicle for the next 8 hours. Here's three ride share options with pooling ones highlighted because you'll be broke once you pay for those beers.

      • And it appears you're rooting for Arsenal. A riot team has been dispatched to take you into custody.

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by Anonymous Coward

          That's the problem with Arsenal, they always try to walk it in.

      • Bar installs VPN, putting an end to both these problems.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by swilver ( 617741 )

          Not really, the app sends the location of your phone, a VPN won't protect you (if the phone even uses the bar's Wifi, and isn't just using 4g).

  • Where's my tin foil? Need a hat. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by torkus ( 1133985 ) on Wednesday June 12, 2019 @03:17PM (#58751594)

    They really are spying on us. Over soccer even (which I get is a bigger deal outside of the US) which I find comical.

    It really goes to show how completely easy it is to abuse data access in apps and how little people pay attention. Location services and Mic...and they can literally monitor what's going on around you. Easily.

    • Yeah that seems like a lot of spying and data crunching to catch something rather mundane...

      • Re:Where's my tin foil? Need a hat. (Score:5, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 12, 2019 @03:27PM (#58751700)

        A friend had a friend that worked at coke. His job was to go to restaurants and bars and order a "Coke". He would then pour some of the coke into a container which was sent to a lab for analysis. Coke wanted to make sure when you ordered a coke you got a coke and would sue any establishment that did not. If this guy ordered a "Coke" and was told they do not serve coke, would he prefer a pepsi, he'd move on to the next establishment on the list. That to me is a lot of trouble. The problem with tech is it makes things that used to be hard, easy.

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by Merk42 ( 1906718 )
          They must have sued a lot of businesses in the American South.

        • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

          by Anonymous Coward

          He was a 'shopper' for Coke. Not a bad gig. A lot of Brick & Mortar stores would have them 'back in the day. Sears, JCP, Kohl's, Loews, Home Depot, Hermes, Galleries Lafayette, Printemps, Harrods, Chanel Couture, etc. I worked with a guy that did the same thing for Guinness. He would visit Guinness owned establishments (the brewery owned the pub) for a pint. He would check things like temp, foam depth, foam density, volume (that it was actually a pint), glass used, etc. Then he drank it and moved

        • Comment removed based on user account deletion

      • Man, you are fooling yourself real hard. There are tons and tons of cash in football. From ad revenue to tickets to Premium channels (TV or otherwise) that are licensed to broadcast games.

        The costs app giving you info and the data crunching are peanuts compared to the obscene revenues involved in football. Besides, they surely are getting returns from that as well.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by swilver ( 617741 )

      Thinking they could get away with this is what surprises me. I hope the law comes down on them hard, to the tune of significant percentage of revenue.

    • They really are spying on us. Over soccer even (which I get is a bigger deal outside of the US) which I find comical.

      It really goes to show how completely easy it is to abuse data access in apps and how little people pay attention. Location services and Mic...and they can literally monitor what's going on around you. Easily.

      It also shows how easy it is for people to discover when their phones are spying on them. It's good to be a bit cautious, but it's also reasonable to assume that any moderately high-profile app would get caught if it tried to do this sort of thing.

      • It also shows how easy it is for people to discover when their phones are spying on them.

        What it discovered before, or after, damage was done?

        Your thinking is just as foolish as the 'thousand eyes' open source theory.

  • Cool use of technology !!! (Score:3)

    by ripvlan ( 2609033 ) on Wednesday June 12, 2019 @03:23PM (#58751660)

    While holy disturbing - you gotta admit it is a cool idea. Assuming they weren't listening to conversations and only fingerprinting the audio it is a terrific example of Minority Report in action. Except they kill the bar owner.

    Geez. How bad is piracy in Spain that this idea even emerged as "we need to do this!" Rather than sending auditors around to random bars and verifying.

    I know, I know. Better idea is to create a system where People can call and Report on the activities of others. Then the gestapo..^h^h^h^h ..authorities can come and investigate.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      Often there are flats over or near bars. The location services on phones aren't that accurate anyway. Seems like there would be a lot of false positives.

      • Often there are flats over or near bars. The location services on phones aren't that accurate anyway. Seems like there would be a lot of false positives.

        Really? I think not. Even if you go to a restaurant/bar destrict, today's gps are really good, and if you add that you can be having 20, 50 or 100 signals in a single spot, even if you are getting some of them off track, that's all you need to send a random dude to check today, confirm there's actually a bar there, and the notification is sent this very afternoon. Damn, with Street view, you may not even need that human check, just browse the location, get the address and then check your list of permits for

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by bn-7bc ( 909819 )
          Horixontal vs vertical precision/accuracy, you ususakl just vera about horizobtal because yu are at ground level, but if you need to determin what floor jo are on the gps in your phone may not me accurate enugh

          • It's not just GPS, location services also uses stuff like nearby APs. Signal strengths will differ even if those are stacked up. Even if you get some false positives, it's helping to reduce the number of locations the auditors have to visit.

    • Geez. How bad is piracy in Spain

      It's not. Don't confuse the idea of "bad piracy" with our fucked up middle men industries wanting to squeeze a few extra dollars of licensing because more than one person dared to look at a TV at the same time.

      Broadcast rights for establishments are a stupid fucking concept in most countries of the world. The idea that you are free to watch or listen something unless someone else can watch or listen that thing as well needs to die.

      I'm just waiting for next football season to get lawyers knocking on my door

    • No this is not a good idea.

      The whole security system that governs apps is broken. In fact when you install an app all the permissions it requires is given automatically (some exceptions with newer droid versions but still it isn't enough).

      It should be the exact reverse - if it wants to access the mic - permission prompt with a permanent "deny and never ask me again" option. Never a "grant and enable for life" option like it does currently.
  • Not sure why, but I feel I am somewhat less surprised to hear it was La Liga doing this than I would be if it was another league.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by 6Yankee ( 597075 )

      Give it access or don't get your fun football updates.

      • Give it access or don't get your fun football updates.

        Give it access on install, then take it away. If I designed such a trojan I'd only make it listen when it was actually useful, so as to avoid detection, so the app would only blow up on people who blocked the permission at the time of the event, and most of them wouldn't notice — especially if you just didn't put anything interesting on the app during the game. Make an excuse about the agreement with broadcasters.

    • I know, right? Any app that asks for any permissions that seem in any way out of the ordinary generally gets deleted immediately by me. Or not installed in the first place. Once in a great while I'll keep a semi-dodgy looking one, but lock down all the permissions. If it still works, great. If it refuses to work, it gets deleted.

      I don't get why people just happily let any app have full access to their phone. It's crazy.

  • Football/ soccer == hooliganism from the top down.

  • Copyright cost vs benefit (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Solandri ( 704621 ) on Wednesday June 12, 2019 @03:45PM (#58751884)
    The real story here is that the copyright advocates keep trying to offload the cost of enforcing their copyrights onto society. As I've said before, copyright is a trade-off. Society accepts the cost of a temporary monopoly, in exchange for creating an incentive for people to produce works worth viewing/listening to. But in order for this to work, the benefit (to the creator) has to exceed the cost (to society). If the cost starts to exceed the benefit, then copyright is doing net harm to society and should be abolished.

    Because only the copyright holder knows how much benefit (money) they're getting from copyright, the only way you can guarantee this trade-off remains beneficial is if the copyright holder also has to bear the full cost of enforcing copyright. That is, copyright only makes sense when the copyright holder is still able to make money from copyright despite bearing the entire cost of enforcing that copyright. The moment the cost of enforcement exceeds the monetary benefit, copyright becomes a net drain on society and should be abolished. And the easiest way to tell if we've reached that point is if the copyright holder is saddled with both the cost and benefit. If you allow them to offload the cost onto someone else (police, ISPs, phone owners, etc), you create a situation where copyright can persist (because the copyright holder is still making money) even though it is a net drain on society (cost to someone else exceeds the money the copyright holder is making).
    • "Society accepts the cost of a temporary monopoly..."

      It's not temporary for Disney.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by tepples ( 727027 )

        It's not temporary for Disney.

        Under current law, U.S. copyright in the earliest Mickey Mouse films and in A. A. Milne's The House at Pooh Corner expires in 2024.

        The US Supreme Court considered whether the 1998 extension constituted "legislative misbehavior" but found that it instead had the intent of harmonizing the term to the result of a mid-1990s extension in Europe. But I don't anticipate another extension before 2024 for two reasons: no major developed market to whose laws to harmonize, and the Authors Guild opposes another extensi [arstechnica.com]

    • No, because most copyright holders don't have deep pockets to fight off some monster organization that wants to lawyer them to death. There's a much simpler way: Have short copyright terms that are renewable - for a rapidly escalating fee. Seven years: free. Fourteen years: $1000. Twenty-one years: $100k. Twenty-eight years: $10M. Thirty-five years: $1B. And so on. Or make it twenty years free, thirty years $100k, forty $10M, fifty $1B. You can alter the terms to make it an effective way for artists to prov

    • The moment the cost of enforcement exceeds the monetary benefit, copyright becomes a net drain on society and should be abolished.

      This is the essential point on which I disagree with you, although I find that I agree with you on most other points. Monetary benefit should not be the only consideration. Pure capitalism is as offensive as pure socialism, or pure communism.

  • A Cost-of-doing-business "fine" (Score:3)

    by Scutter ( 18425 ) on Wednesday June 12, 2019 @04:04PM (#58752066) Journal

    So, 10 million downloads, a fine that's little more than a slap on the wrist, and no criminal charges for recording illegally. Oh yeah, I'm sure buried in the ToS somewhere is their "get out of jail free" card where you theoretically game them permission to spy on you. Sounds about right.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      It's not a cost of doing business, it's just the fine for the first offence. If they keep doing it the fines will get larger, and they could even be effectively shut down.

  • Spain is a pain (Score:2, Insightful)

    by AndyKron ( 937105 )
    A fine? These fuckers need some serious JAIL TIME!

  • Maybe I'm "doing it wrong", but the way apps "manage" access to phone components is screwy.

    For example, I needed a basic Android PDF viewer. The only normal free one produced a message something like "To install, you must allow this app to have access to media files including photos, music, and movies. Confirm | Cancel"

    I only need it to have access to PDF files, not my po ... uh, movies and photos. Why can't I easily restrict it to only use PDF files instead of have it all or nothing?

    Maybe there is "deep f

    • . Why can't I easily restrict it to only use PDF files instead of have it all or nothing?

      Because it's not getting access to you photos, music and movies explicitly. It's getting read(/write?) access to your media directory.

      • If it's getting access to the media directory, then it is getting access to his music, photos and movies... isn't it?

        • I mean, it's not getting access to those things if he stores them elsewhere, and it is getting access to his PDFs and all other data there. It's just a non-technical explanation for users, and here on slashdot we can be more precise.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by mcl630 ( 1839996 )

          It can't access PDF files in the media directory without access to the media directory.

    • How is a PDF file viewer supposed to work if it can't access the file system? You could have saved the file anywhere, including where some other app might save images and music.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Tablizer ( 95088 )

        How is a PDF file viewer supposed to work if it can't access the file system?

        Being given access to only PDF files (or file types I choose).

        • How is a PDF file viewer supposed to work if it can't access the file system?

          Being given access to only PDF files (or file types I choose).

          Because the filesystem has no idea what kind of file any file might be. Sure, there's the convention of giving the filename an extension but that's all application level. To do what you describe would take a whole new level of management inbetween the filesystem and anything wanting to read files and thus it would be a whole new level of bugs, security risks, etc, etc, etc.

  • Wow this site sure turned to shit (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Remember the days before facebook was a thing and all the mouth breathers were still afraid of the internet.

    i guess when facebook got old they started coming here so they could feel smart and gradually dummed it down to there level.

    RIP slahsdot, i forgot you existed for a while, then i checked to see if you were alive, and the answer is no, slashdot seems to have died a while ago.

  • A whole ~$300k fine.
    ( That'll teach em for sure :| )

    I'm pretty sure the lowest paid executive makes a yearly bonus far in excess of that amount.

    These fines are just laughable.

  • It is a futbol app this happened overseas where it is NOT called soccer.

  • Article Summarized:

    Spanish data protection agency finds megacorp guilty of grave abuses, demonstrates own impotence by farting in their general direction.

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