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January 11, 2021 03:25 pm

Leaked Location Data Shows Another Muslim Prayer App Tracking Users

Joseph Cox, reporting at Vice's Motherboard: One user travelled through a park a few blocks south of an Islamic cultural center. Roughly every two minutes, their phone reported their physical location. Another was next to a bank two streets over from a different mosque. A third person was at a train station, again near a mosque. Perhaps unbeknownst to these people, Salaat First (Prayer Times), an app that reminds Muslims when to pray, was recording and selling their granular location information to a data broker, which in turn sells location data to other clients. Motherboard has obtained a large dataset of those raw, precise movements of users of the app from a source. The source who provided the dataset was concerned that such sensitive information, which could potentially track Muslims going about their day including visiting places of worship, could be abused by those who buy and make use of the data. The company collecting the location data, a French firm called Predicio, has previously been linked to a supply chain of data involving a U.S. government contractor that worked with ICE, Customs and Border Protection, and the FBI. The news about Salaat First, which has been downloaded more than 10 million times on Android, highlights not only the use of religious apps to harvest location data, but also the ease at which this sensitive information is traded in the location data industry. Motherboard is withholding some specifics about the dataset such as its exact size in order to protect the source, but the significance is clear: users of a Muslim-focused app are being tracked likely without their informed consent. "Being tracked all day provides a lot of information, and it shouldn't be usable against you, especially if you are unaware of it," the source said. Motherboard granted them anonymity to avoid repercussions from their employer.

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