Spanish Soccer League App 'La Liga' Attempts to Detect Unauthorized Match Broadcasting Using Questionable Means

The Spanish football championship La Liga has taken severe measures to detect and prevent illegal broadcasting of matches. This week, cyber-security researchers warned that the official Android application of La Liga has been spying on users during match times with the purpose of obtaining information on locations where matches could be broadcasted without a valid license.

In an attempt to defend itself, the League has issued an official statement on its website, where it explains the behavior of its app with the fact that considerable amounts of money are lost from unlicensed broadcast of games at bars and clubs, the estimated costs of such illegal streaming of matches coming as high as 150 Euro each year. The officials also claim that the unprecedented surveillance campaign started just a few days before being detected, namely on June 8th.

The La Liga app tracks the GPS location of users and listens to their surroundings at times when Spanish football matches take place, or at least this is what has been confirmed so far. In order to be able to listen to a user's surroundings at match times, upon installation, the Android application asks for permission to access the device's microphone. Such a request should raise concern among users since the app would not need it if its only purpose were to send goal alerts, schedules, scores, and other general news related to the Spanish football games. After activating the microphone, the app is able to recognize if something wrong is happening around the device and, in that case, it collects the GPS locations and sends all the gathered information to the League.

The organization's officials claim that this is a necessary evil as it would protect license owners who pay diligently, and on the other hand, expose those who broadcast matches without a valid license.

Of course, La Liga also declares that its app is not collecting any other details from affected devices and that the purpose of this transfer of information is solely the prevention of illegal activities. For users, however, these excuses do not seem to make much of a difference. The news about the spying feature of the La Liga app caused a blast of negative reviews for the application on the official Google Play Store, making its overall rating drop significantly within days. The Store's statistics show the app has been downloaded on around 10 million devices. Another important fact is that the questionable feature concerns only users of Android as the same app for iOS does not show such behavior.