La Liga uses your mobile to detect bars that broadcast pirate football

The LFP app asks for access to the microphone and geolocation to end the fraud in the retransmissions

    The arrival of the new Data Protection Regulation (RGPD) has brought many surprises in the services offered by many companies. Terms and conditions of use that were practically ignored by the vast majority of users.

The last one to 'update' has been La Liga and has done it with a surprise. "We created an Integrity department in which twelve people work, twelve hackers hired, I do not count the lawyers. We work in the lobby, in Washington and Brussels.


     In Spain we are in an intermediate phase going to the courts to get operators to cancel the signal to pirate urls. In addition, we work on legal issues with Intellectual Property registered in the Criminal Code, "said Javier Tebas, president of La Liga, earlier this year.

And a tool to combat this problem, create the LFP, are smartphones. Under the call "Help your team!", La Liga asks permission to access the microphone and GPS to discover if the bar in question issues football by paying a license or does it illegally.


      The mandatory compliance of the new European RGPD has revealed this practice that the League itself has confirmed in a statement. �When a user downloads or updates the APP, the operating system of your mobile device will ask you through a pop-up window to provide your consent so that LaLiga can activate the microphone and the geolocation of your mobile device.

 Only if you decide to accept it, the microphone will capture the binary code of audio fragments, with the sole purpose of knowing if you are watching football matches of competitions disputed by LaLiga teams, but the content of the recording will never be accessed �.

      In that same note, the body chaired by Javier Tebas points out that the app "will activate the microphone and the geolocation of the devices during the time slots in which games are played in which teams belonging to the body play." However, the user has the option to revoke the access of the app to the microphone and geolocation.

       The controversy not only remains there, since the data compiled by the LFP is not entirely anonymous. The League explains that �the codes will not refer to your name, but to your IP address and the specific ID that the app assigns when the user registers�, so they can be associated to a specific user.