To attend the championship this year, fans must use a digital ticket provided through UEFA’s Ticket application. According to Heise, this app requires access to personal data, including name, email, phone number, and GPS permissions. While app store descriptions note the collection of personal information and activity data for analysis purposes, they omit any mention of location sharing.
That can’t possibly be legal in Europe. The article suggests it doesn’t technically violate GDPR, but that still can’t be legal, can it?
You seem to be operating on a mistaken understanding of the EU. While the EU works to protect citizens within the EU from being monitored, tracked, and monetized by foreign entities and private EU companies, they have no concept of personal privacy of citizens within the EU from the EU governments themselves. If the data is being sent to the police, it is legal. See the EU Councils position on encryption and what level of access law enforcement within EU nations should have.
The UEFA ticket app doesn’t even have location functions. They’re talking about the Euro 2024 app, which I also checked and it doesn’t take location data, and it doesn’t share data at all.
I don’t know if they changed it or if users were talking about another app.
Oddly enough when I searched for the apps in the store, another unrelated football app showed at the top and it did exactly what the article is claiming.
When and how did you check this? The following quotes are taken from the posted article, emphasis mine.
The entire point of this story is that the UEFA ticket app requires access to location functions without telling the user. Have you either used a tool like exodus or extracted the source code of the ticket app from the apk and manually reviewed it?
Also, you sound like you’re under the assumption that users reported this. You realize that this was originally reported by the German IT news outlet heise.de and not by complaints from random users right?
Right after I read the article and before I left the comment.
From Germany through the Google Play store
I’m alaware Heise reported it, but they said themselves that a user reported it to them and they didn’t add that they checked it. The article above even had to correct them that it wasn’t the app Heise called out.
What? The Heise article talks about how both apps access location APIs, but UEFA only publicly acknowledges that the second app tracks. The issue here is that the ticket app tracks, but UEFA says it doesn’t. The issue here is that UEFA is lying.
Looking at the permissions on the German Google Play store will obviously show that location is not used by the ticket app, because the entire issue being reported is that location is accessed without the knowledge of the users and without being reported in the app stores. This is why I asked how you checked, you need to check the app with something like Exodus or rev eng it and look at the actual api calls made in the source code.
I feel like I’m taking crazy pills. Do you just not believe that developers could lie, either directly or by omission, about what data their app collects?