Popular Muslim prayer app ends relationship with firm selling data to US military
The popular Islamic lifestyle app Muslim Pro, which has nearly 150 million downloads around the world, says it will stop selling its users’ location data to a tech firm that resells that information to the US military.
An investigation published by Vice News on November 16 found that Muslim Pro and the dating app Muslim Mingle were among hundreds of seemingly benign smartphone apps that have been providing their users’ location data to private companies.
These third-party data brokers—in the case of Muslim Pro and Muslim Mingle, a company called X-Mode—sold that anonymized location data to various contractors, who then provided it to the US military. Vice’s investigation found that the US Special Operations Command, a branch of the military responsible for counterterrorism, counterinsurgency, and special reconnaissance, purchased location data mined from the apps in order to support overseas missions.
