U.S. Military Reportedly Buying User Data From Muslim Prayer App
Written by SOURCE on November 16, 2020
A Muslim prayer app that tells its users when to pray has reportedly sold user location data to a company that sells to U.S. military contractors.
In a report by Joseph Cox for Vice, it has been revealed that Muslim Pro, an app with over 98 million downloads, is being utilized by the military for “counterterrorism” purposes. The U.S. military has used, or continues to use two different data streams, Babel Street and X-Mode, to obtain location data. The latter of the two gets its location information from apps directly, which it has sold to contractors that include the military.
Muslim Pro is an app that reminds its users when to pray, and can also inform people of the direction Mecca is from where the user currently is. Also included in the app is passages from the Quran, including audio readings. It’s worth noting that as of right now, Muslim pro fails to mention X-Mode in its privacy policy. There is also no pop-up when the app is installed that tells the user that their location data could be sold or shared.
Muslim Pro isn’t the only Muslim-oriented app that has sent data to X-Mode, but it is the biggest. Another one of the apps that has been targeted is Muslim Mingle, a dating app that has been downloaded over 100,000 times.
Minnesota House representative Ilhan Omar criticized both the military and the companies behind the apps in a brief tweet on Monday. “The military industrial complex and the surveillance state have always had a cozy relationship with tech,” she wrote. “Buying bulk data in order to profile Muslims is par for the course for them – and is absolutely sickening. It should be illegal!”
Check out what Twitter had to say about the report below.
