Friday, March 29

The Treasury geolocates taxpayers via mobile: why it is now legal for them to spy on us


The Treasury has begun to spy on the geolocation of taxpayers’ mobiles. A technique that may seem to directly violate our privacy, but they do so in a completely legal way, thanks to the approval of a recent law. Through GPS, WiFi or Bluetooth, the Tax Agency pursues the location of citizens under the idea of ​​fighting tax fraud.


The Google rate as an excuse. The Treasury is protected by the Tax Law on Certain Digital Services, approved in October 2020 and which began to come into force at the beginning of 2021. For this year’s Income campaign, the Treasury has been following the geolocation of taxpayers. The motivation is to be able to apply what are known as the ‘Google tax’ and the ‘Tobin tax’, a tax on technological multinationals that depends on the services they provide in Spain.

To calculate how many taxes must be applied to these companies, the law establishes that different geolocation technologies of customer devices may be used.

What the mobile IP says. Beyond the effects on privacy, there are many doubts about the fact that the mobile IP is representative of the real location of the taxpayer. As in the case of downloads, this analogy raises many questions at the legal level.

As described by the law: “it will be presumed that a certain device of a user is in the place determined according to its IP address, unless it can be concluded that said place is a different one through the use of other admissible means of proof. in law, in particular, the use of other geolocation instruments”.

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The tax goes to large companies, but we are the ones spied on. The ‘Google tax’ is a tax levied at 3% of the income obtained in Spain to all those multinationals that invoice more than 750 million euros worldwide or more than 3 million euros in Spain.

These companies must specify the processes, methods and algorithms they use and must keep a quarterly record that they will have to keep and deliver to the Administration. That is, users are geolocated by companies and the Treasury, but not to pay our taxes, but to be accounted for.

Criticism for the excessive use of information and its dubious scope. From the Spanish Association of the Digital Economy (Adigital) it has been criticized that the method is difficult to apply and supposes an excess of loss of privacy for taxpayers. According to his calculations, last year it served to intercept operations worth 8,000 million euros on more than 200 digital platforms. An amount that may seem high, but it is very short considering the market of large technology companies in Spain.

Does any method work? Treasury wants to closely monitor our financial movements. Be it to pursue cryptocurrency operations or to see if that photo we have posted on Instagram corresponds to a possible fraud. Geolocation is now also added to the long list of digital and technological methods used by the Treasury.

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