14 DAY TRIAL // La Liga, the official app of the Spanish football league, has been caught snooping on Android users by tracking their GPS location and listening to their surroundings with the built-in microphone.
The purpose? To detect illegal match broadcasts and prevent those without a license from making money with La Liga matches.
As weird as this may sound, the surveillance campaign, which the league swears was introduced on June 8, spies on users exclusively during match times in an attempt to detect whether locations like bars broadcast games without a license.
In order to do so, upon installation, the application requires access to the microphone, a permission that it wouldn’t otherwise need because its purpose is to offer goal alerts, news, schedules, and scores of Spanish football games. But by receiving access to the microphone, it can activate the snitching and listen to users’ surroundings during match timetables.
Necessary evil
If something illegal is detected, then the application collects GPS information and sends the entire package to the league, helping license owners accurately determine who broadcast the match without a license.
La Liga defends this behavior in a statement on its website, explaining that it has no other option than to turn to such tactics because, you know, it’s losing money due to unlicensed broadcasts. In other words, spying on users is a necessary evil because otherwise, the league cannot reduce the 150 million Euro loss that it records every year as a result of illegal streaming.
Of course, the league has also guaranteed that no other details are collected and transferring information from mobile devices has no other purpose. Only Android is affected, and the iOS app doesn’t seem to include such behavior, which has apparently been carried out in Spain exclusively.
Needless to say, news of this unexpected feature of the La Liga app has caused its Google Play store rating to drop significantly, with the most recent reviews blasting the league for spying on users. There are more than 10 million devices running this app, according to Store stats.