Muslim Pro is a popular application for Muslims, providing data on the time of azan and namaz, used by almost one hundred million Muslims worldwide. The app has been downloaded more than 50 million times worldwide on Android devices, according to the Google Play Store, and more than 95 million in total on other platforms, including iOS, according to the Muslim Pro website.
Meanwhile, information portal Vice’s Motherboard reports that the US military is buying location data collected from popular Muslim apps. The Muslim Pro app has also not been left out of the spotlight of Americans. Vice’s Motherboard, claims that the popular portal sells its users’ personal data to brokers, including the US military.
In a post titled “How the U.S. Military Buys Location Data from Ordinary Apps”, published on the site of Vice’s Motherboard, it is reported that in this simple way, the US military acquired data on the location of millions of Muslims from around the world. This applies to those Muslims who use the popular prayer app and Muslim Dating app.
The US military uses two separate data streams to get information about users’ location. One relies on a company called Babel Street, which developed the Locate x product. The US special operations Command (USSOCOM), which deals with counterterrorism, counterinsurgency, and special intelligence, bought access to Locate X to help with special forces operations abroad.
Supply Chain
The Locate X service provides advertising data obtained from marketing sources to intelligence agencies, law enforcement agencies, and the military for monitoring purposes. As the WSJ notes, there is a clause in the terms of use of the service, according to which customers do not have the right to disclose the existence of Locate X. It is known that the obtained location data is often used to target drone strikes.
Vice employees also installed the Muslim Mingle dating service. This service also sent the exact coordinates of the phone’s current location and the name of the Wi-Fi network in X-Mode. Vice has discovered another network of dating apps that look and work much like Mingle, including sending data to X-Mode. These include Iran Social, Turkey Social, Egypt Social, Colombia Social, and other country-specific applications.
The CEO of X-Mode recently revealed that the company tracks 25 million devices each month in the United States and 40 million elsewhere, including in the European Union, Latin America, and the Asia-Pacific region.
Muslim Pro has already announced that it will no longer share data with X-Mode. But no matter how trusting the program looks, or even if you really need it, be vigilant.
References:
Muslim Pro users denounce tech firm after their data ‘sold to US military’ – Middle East Eye
How the U.S. Military Buys Location Data from Ordinary Apps – Vice
