By Saffiyah Khalique
Your commercial awareness dose
A report released by Vice’s Motherboard earlier this week exposed that the United States military has been purchasing location data from seemingly ordinary apps. The most popular app happens to be Muslim Pro, a prayer app which allows Muslims from across the world to track prayer times. An app that has 98 million downloads worldwide,
with 50 million downloads on Android. Other apps include a Muslim dating app, a popular Craigslist app and a weather app.
All of these apps share location data with thirty-parties, who then sell the data onto clients, such as military contractors. Motherboard uncovered two data streams that the U.S. military has been using or had used to secure location data. One of these is through a company called X-Mode, which receives location data directly from apps and then sells this data onto contractors, which includes the military.
The behaviours of the military are concerning for two reasons, one of them being that one of the data company’s, Babel Street sells location data to the U.S. Special Operations Command – a branch of the military that deals with counterterrorism, counterinsurgency,
and special reconnaissance.
This is concerning the majority of the apps are ones targeted explicitly to Muslim users. This is significant because of the political relations between the United States and their wars in the Middle East against Muslim terror groups, and the previous use of the U.S. Military using location data in drone strikes. The motherboard did not find a direct link of any operations where this app-based location data has been used by the U.S. military.
Delving further into X-Mode, this company has sold data to clients which include a private intelligence firm that aims to track people to their doorstep. Motherboard found that some app developers that had worked with X-Mode were unaware of where their users’ location data was being sent. The inclusion of ‘mundane’ apps, such as weather, prayer, dating and step counting apps, all of which have millions of downloads, is that the individual is under surveillance in their daily lives without knowing. How does the consumer know which apps they can trust if seemingly ordinary apps are being used to harvest and sell location data?
Even the most tech-savvy and privacy-concerned user could not understand from reading an app’s privacy policy which was buying their data. This data is typically anonymised. However, it is straightforward for organisations to de-anonymise and track individuals without their fully informed consent. Moreover, it is alarming to the consumer is that even if this data that is being transferred is anonymised, this process can be easily undone, and their sensitive information is open to consumption.
This data transfer, in particular relation to Muslim Pro, includes the name of the Wi-Fi network the phone was using, timestamps, and information about the device, including what model it is. They do not mention X-Mode in their privacy policy or have any detailed explanation of the data transfer.
Further implications of this data breach are that governments and organisations could track demographics of the population that they perceive as a threat or undesirable. This could have effects on freedom of movement and political protest if the locations of individuals are this easily accessible. There are also global concerns with the apps being downloaded internationally and thus could pose international security issues.
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