Opening up BBC Sounds to others’ podcasts and commercial radio

Re:Opening up BBC Sounds to others’ podcasts and commercial ... by Mindwipe on Friday April 12, 2019 @09:28AM (#19644580)

> It doesn't apply to audio of course, but watching BBC video content now requires you to be a licence payer doesn't it? So they need to know who you are. I guess they just extended the system to all content for simplicity.

The database for the BBC website logins and the database for people who have a license fee aren't connected, and couldn't be under the Data Protection Act.

The BBC login doesn't check if the information is valid, or if you have a license, it's literally just for user tracking for data.

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Re:Opening up BBC Sounds to others’ podcasts and commercial ... by DanBC on Saturday April 13, 2019 @04:38AM (#19651803)

> and couldn't be under the Data Protection Act.

Watching tv without a licence is a crime and DPA includes exceptions for the detection or prevention of crime.

Which bit of DPA do you think prevents them linking these databases?

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Re:Opening up BBC Sounds to others’ podcasts and commercial ... by Mindwipe on Tuesday April 16, 2019 @05:40AM (#19672292)

It's the difference between specific and general monitoring.

The BBC can absolutely take an individual login to iPlayer that they think is suspicious, and have TV licensing determine if that address has a license.

But it is objectively true that you can type in any old nonsense into a BBC account registration and it does not validate it against the License Fee database - that's because moving to a general system of checking is not what that database would be collected for, and would probably not be found to be a proportionate or non-general monitoring and therefore cannot use that exemption.

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