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Spanish football league defends phone 'spying'

bbc.com

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Re: Spanish football league defends phone 'spying'

#31

Post by Tharkun »

paulcole wrote: post #15
lightbyte wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would GDPR even cover this? I don't see why La Liga would need to include any personal information about the user in their data. They are concerned with identifying the buisness streaming pirated matches, not who is watching. Edit: The official statement actually answers this >The codes will not refer to your name, but to your IP address and the specific ID assigned by the PPP when you register.

If someone's recording the sounds around me, I don't see anyway that's not personal information about me.

Who would be the guilty party here? If your phone is spying on me, I'll likely get angry with you. The fact that you're a victim of the football league isn't my problem, you're the one doing the spying.

Re: Spanish football league defends phone 'spying'

#32

Post by caf »

danbruc wrote: post #25

If you generate a fingerprint of the audio on the phone, you would not leak too much information about the environment. Shazam, for example, computes the spectrum, picks the strongest peaks, and uses the relative positions of small groups of peaks in time and frequency as features to search for in known recordings. Those features are quite sparse and you can not reconstruct the audio from them. You could however iden…

The whole thing could be done locally on the phone: "You appear to be watching the match at a commercial premises which hasn't paid to license - report this?"

Actually, thinking about this you wouldn't even really need the users to report the venues - just shaming the venue to their customers with a banner in the app might well be enough.

Re: Spanish football league defends phone 'spying'

#33

Post by Rjevski »

Just wondering, are the games broadcast on paid channels or on public and free-to-view ones?

This approach would make sense if the games are on paid channels and the nominal fee for those only covers viewing for one person (in which case it makes sense for establishments to pay more, given they're showing it to more people).

But if the games are broadcast on free channels, then there shouldn't be any difference whether or not a person is watching it at home or a bar is showing the game - in either case, the TV advertisers are the ones paying for the game, and this revenue depends on how many people watch the channel (so showing off the game in a bar actually benefits everyone).

I feel like in this situation it's the latter, and the people from the football league are just greedy (what a surprise) and any excuse to try and extort money is a good one in their book.

Re: Spanish football league defends phone 'spying'

#34

Post by Jare »

Rjevski wrote: post #33

Just wondering, are the games broadcast on paid channels or on public and free-to-view ones? This approach would make sense if the games are on paid channels and the nominal fee for those only covers viewing for one person (in which case it makes sense for establishments to pay more, given they're showing it to more people). But if the games are broadcast on free channels, then there shouldn't be any difference wheth…

Showing the TV program in a bar is a public performance, and the license only allows for private use. Regardless how you interpret the benefits of public display (and I agree 100% with you), it's not our decision but the licensor's.

Re: Spanish football league defends phone 'spying'

#35

Post by Rjevski »

Jare wrote: post #34
Rjevski wrote: post #33

Just wondering, are the games broadcast on paid channels or on public and free-to-view ones? This approach would make sense if the games are on paid channels and the nominal fee for those only covers viewing for one person (in which case it makes sense for establishments to pay more, given they're showing it to more people). But if the games are broadcast on free channels, then there shouldn't be any difference wheth…

Showing the TV program in a bar is a public performance, and the license only allows for private use. Regardless how you interpret the benefits of public display (and I agree 100% with you), it's not our decision but the licensor's.

Anything that can be received for free over the air without signing any kind of license agreement should not count as "public performance" in my book.

Re: Spanish football league defends phone 'spying'

#36

Post by acjohnson55 »

Rjevski wrote: post #35
Jare wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Showing the TV program in a bar is a public performance, and the license only allows for private use. Regardless how you interpret the benefits of public display (and I agree 100% with you), it's not our decision but the licensor's.

Anything that can be received for free over the air without signing any kind of license agreement should not count as "public performance" in my book.

Aereo thought so too. Their business model was based around hosting colocated TV antennas, from which they streamed broadcast TV to users on a 1:1 basis, geofenced by broadcast market. The Supreme Court shot this argument down.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aereo

The problem is that this is the business model of broadcast networks in a world of cable TV. The statutory retransmission fees funnel some cable TV revenue back to the broadcasters. It doesn't really make sense from first principles, but it has been a pragmatic compromise.

The messed up thing about Aereo is that after being shot down by the Supreme Court, they tried to get a license to operate as a cable company but were shot down on that front, too.

Re: Spanish football league defends phone 'spying'

#37

Post by acjohnson55 »

throw2016 wrote: post #18

Interesting only Android users are targeted thanks to Google's frivolous approach to privacy and surveillance. At what point does Google take responsibility? Here is an OS and permission system that works against its users based on open source technology by a surveillance loving company actively involved in building a techno dystopia. That summarizes everything wrong with tech today. But even worse is the army of sho…

You always have to explicitly approve recording, and I pretty sure permission monitor can alert you when background recording is happening. It does this for background location usage, for sure.

Granted, the Apple App Store review process would probably have shot down this app.

Re: Spanish football league defends phone 'spying'

#38

Post by chopin »

Tharkun wrote: post #31
paulcole wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If someone's recording the sounds around me, I don't see anyway that's not personal information about me.

Who would be the guilty party here? If your phone is spying on me, I'll likely get angry with you. The fact that you're a victim of the football league isn't my problem, you're the one doing the spying.

La Liga of course. They are recording data about me, without my consent. Doing it through some third party (the phone owner) doesn't absolve them.

Re: Spanish football league defends phone 'spying'

#39

Post by mkeyhani »

> It added it had received the microphone data only as code rather than audio, and that it could match that code with audio data from a match.

That sounds funnily absurd to me. By that line of argument, even sound is not really audio. After all, it's being encoded as air pressure waves :-)

EDIT: Pardon my ignorance. Based on Google Translate's translation of their statement [1], it seems that they are using some kind of perceptual hashing which is quite interesting.

[1]: http://www.laliga.es/noticias/nota-informativa-138

Re: Spanish football league defends phone 'spying'

#40

Post by Bromskloss »

mkeyhani wrote: post #39

> It added it had received the microphone data only as code rather than audio, and that it could match that code with audio data from a match. That sounds funnily absurd to me. By that line of argument, even sound is not really audio. After all, it's being encoded as air pressure waves :-) EDIT: Pardon my ignorance. Based on Google Translate's translation of their statement [1], it seems that they are using some kind…

I guess they mean that they just have a summary of the sound, not enough to listen to it or anything. It would be a bit like just having the hash of a piece of data, not the data itself.
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