US MILITARY ALLEGEDLY BUYING LOCATION DATA ON MUSLIM APP: REPORT

Tue 17 November 2020:

Muslim Pro, a prayer app with over 98 million downloads, reminds users about daily prayers and provides readings from the Quran. The company calls it “The most popular Muslim app.”

It also tracks users’ location and sells that location data to brokers — and the US military is one of the buyers, according to a new report from Vice’s Motherboard.

According to VICE report apps on iOS and Android are quietly siphoning off GPS location data on millions of users to data brokers that then sell it to military contractors and “by extension, the military.”

Muslim prayer and Quran app

Many of the apps that have been found to include X-Mode are geared towards Muslim audiences, such as Muslim Pro, an app that reminds users when to pray. The app has been downloaded more than 50 million times on Android, and almost 100 million times in total across other platforms. Another app using X-Mode is the dating app Muslim Mingle.

The purchases of different companies and agencies were criticized by many privacy advocates. However, the location data firms, together with their partners, claimed that the location of the people using their apps is anonymized.

They added that their sensitive data are not directly linked to their identities, which means that their location information is unknown. But, some studies contradicted their claims and explained that it is easy to de-anonymize users’ location information and then link them back to the individual people.

“The most popular app among a group Motherboard analyzed connected to this sort of data sale is a Muslim prayer and Quran app that has more than 98 million downloads worldwide,” the report continues. “Others include a Muslim dating app, a popular Craigslist app, an app for following storms, and a ‘level’ app that can be used to help, for example, install shelves in a bedroom.”

According to Motherboard, its exposé is the first to reveal that the controversial practice of purchasing such information isn’t limited to U.S. law enforcement but also extends to the military. As the report explains:

Through public records, interviews with developers, and technical analysis, Motherboard uncovered two separate, parallel data streams that the U.S. military uses, or has used, to obtain location data. One relies on a company called Babel Street, which creates a product called Locate X. U.S. Special Operations Command (USSOCOM), a branch of the military tasked with counterterrorism, counterinsurgency, and special reconnaissance, bought access to Locate X to assist on overseas special forces operations. The other stream is through a company called X-Mode, which obtains location data directly from apps, then sells that data to contractors, and by extension, the military.

Some critics directed their ire in part at the companies behind the apps named in the report, including Muslim Pro—which reminds users when to pray and the direction Mecca from their current location and includes passages and audio readings from Quran—as well as the dating app Muslim Mingle. Both apps send data to X-Mode.

Reps. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) tweeted on Monday that “the military industrial complex and the surveillance state have always had a cozy relationship with tech. Buying bulk data in order to profile Muslims is par for the course for them—and is absolutely sickening. It should be illegal!”

The military industrial complex and the surveillance state have always had a cozy relationship with tech. Buying bulk data in order to profile Muslims is par for the course for them – and is absolutely sickening. It should be illegal! https://t.co/kNqQXP9lCF

— Ilhan Omar (@IlhanMN) November 16, 2020

Omar was far from alone in expressing outrage over the revelation that the U.S. military is attaining data from mobile phone applications:

Dr. Omar Suleiman tweeted: This is wild and unacceptable. Download a Quran/prayer app and end up with your data sold to a counterterrorism unit of the US military. No Muslim app should be selling data, especially not like this:

This is wild and unacceptable. Download a Quran/prayer app and end up with your data sold to a counterterrorism unit of the US military.

No Muslim app should be selling data, especially not like this. Wowhttps://t.co/afQRVm5V7S

— Dr. Omar Suleiman (@omarsuleiman504) November 16, 2020

This is…. quite wild. Muslim Pro, a popular app millions of Muslims use calculate prayer times based on their location – and read the Quran – is actually harvesting user data and selling it to the US military. https://t.co/ldBwLVBWvD

— Khadija Patel (@khadijapatel) November 16, 2020

I can’t believe MuslimPro is selling us out like this, time to start using a stick and checking the shadows to figure out salah times. https://t.co/wM5JpKrYdE

— Najma Sharif (@overdramatique) November 16, 2020

Both Muslim Pro and Mingle didn’t respond to Motherboard‘s requests for comment.

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