It seems that the US military buys location data for people around the world (the majority of whom are Muslims) that are harvested by seemingly innocuous apps, but they sell their users' data to intermediaries and contractors who in turn sell that data to the US military, so we know the story.

US Military Buys Location Data


what is the story

You can imagine that an application such as Muslim Pro, which provides us Muslims with knowledge of prayer times and Qibla and contains more than 98 million downloads from around the world, is one of those applications that sells location data of its users to third parties to eventually reach the US Army and uses it to track and monitor Muslims.

There are applications other than the prayer application that have been discovered to sell the location data of their users, and they include a dating application for Muslims, a popular classifieds application, an application to track weather and storms, and other applications that include millions of users from everywhere.

Through interviews with developers and public records, Motherboard revealed two methods used by the US military to obtain location data, the first by a company called Babel Street, a pioneer in data analysis that provides a product called Locate X. The US Army has purchased access to this product to assist Special Forces overseas operations.

The second method is through a company called X-Mode, which acts as a middleman and gets the site data directly in cooperation with the developers to put their own programming package that collects the data. Then X-Mode sells that data to the contractors and then the US military gets it.


We are being watched

SPY

It is worth saying that most of the users of the applications from which the location data was purchased are Muslims. Perhaps this is due to the war waged by America for decades against terrorist groups in the Middle East and its war in Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan, and Motherboard could not know the operations in which the US military used this type of location data Based applications.

"We use location data to support the requirements of special operations forces overseas," said Tim Hawkins, a spokesperson for US Special Operations Command. "We strictly adhere to procedures and policies in place to protect the privacy, civil liberties, and constitutional and legal rights of US citizens."

Last March, Motherboard obtained a classified document confirming that some US law enforcement agencies like customs and even the Immigration Department use location data for a product like Locate X and there are other agencies like Border Protection and the Internal Revenue Service, which bought access to location data from a company called Venntel.


How to get location data for the US Army

US Military Buys Location Data

Some companies obtain location data for apps in two ways:

Method 1 It is bidstream data, and to explain this concept more clearly, bid data is data that is collected from ad servers when displaying ads on mobile applications and websites. This type is one of the easiest types of website data that can be obtained, and site data is often collected with other data. About the user, but it is not accurate or complete, but the most valuable in that data is that it provides accurate site data.

The second method It is a software development package SDKs, which are codes that application developers put into their applications and through these codes can collect location data from the device in which the application is installed and that data collected by the SDKs has the ability to be very accurate and insightful, as it can track the user's habits Daily and not just location data.


X-Mode company is after everyone

Site data company X-Mode encourages application developers to develop its own software development package to obtain location data for users of those applications and in return the company pays developers based on the number of users of their applications, if you have an application with 50 thousand active daily users in America, you will get Get $ 1500 a month from X-Mode.

In a recent interview with CNN, Joshua Anton, CEO of X-Mode, said, "We track 25 million devices in America every month, and 40 million devices in other regions including Europe, Latin America and Asia Pacific." Built in about 400 apps.

Motherboard was able to monitor the Android and iPhone versions of the Muslim Pro application through a network analysis program and found that the application sends accurate location data to X-Mode several times and the other data included the name of the Wi-Fi network, information about the phone, its model and timeline, and other applications that sell location data included For X-Mode, the step calculator app Accupedo has more than 5 million downloads on Google Play and the CPlus for Craigslist classifieds app has more than one million downloads, and there is a Global Storms app, which also has more than a million downloads.

Also there is the Muslim Mingle dating app, which Motherboard installed on an Android phone, and noted that the app sends accurate coordinates to the current location of the phone next to the name of the Wi-Fi network and the app is owned by a company called Mingle, based in Vietnam.

Motherboard discovered a network of other dating apps that work identically with the Mingel app and installed one of those apps called Iran Social and also noted that GPS coordinates are sent to X-Mode company, there is another network of apps that sell their users' location data, such as Turkey Social and Egypt Social and Colombia Social.


Defense contractors

After X-Mode buys that data, the next phase begins, which is selling it to a wide range of different clients or defense contractors such as Sierra Nevada, which manufactures warplanes for the US Air Force, Northrop Grumman, the contractor that develops electronic and smart equipment for the US military, and another contracting company such as Systems & Technology. Research, which has contracts with the Army, Navy, and Air Force and then that data is sold from contractors to the US military itself.

When Motherboard made it clear to a number of app developers that sell location data to X-Mode that the latter were selling data to military companies and defense contractors, they all denied knowledge of this and most of them thought the data was being sold for advertising.

As for the X-Mode site data company, it says on its website that it obtains consent from the application's users to collect their site data, of course because most users do not read the policies or conditions of the application and what he will do with the data, of course the company’s policy does not mention that it will sell the data to military contractors or Private intelligence companies wrap around with phrases like "location data is used for disease prevention, research, security, crime control and law enforcement."


Comment iPhone Islam

We said a thousand times, and we still say ...

If you do not pay for the commodity, you will be the commodity

Google is free, Facebook is free, WhatsApp is free, you are deluded, there are none of these applications or others free, all of them earn one way or another so that you can continue, and if you do not pay them, your data is the price, and this is normal and logical and we talked about it repeatedly.

This does not mean that the topic is confusing to many, prayer and Quran applications that we trust, and these applications are spying for the benefit of the US military!

First: I know that most of these applications did not know that the users' data ends up with the US military, but most of these applications deceived them, so before you disbelieve the owners of these applications and God knows their intentions, make your opinion good about them until it becomes clear otherwise.

SecondYou are the one who should protect your privacy, the subject is that prayer applications steal your data and put in all news headlines in order to distort religion, but many applications, such as sports applications and weather applications, do the same thing and most of them come with an easy profit only by installing a development package that collects user data . Do not make your site available to everyone, and Apple gives you tools such as giving permission to your site once, giving an inaccurate site and other privacy tools that allow you to control this matter. It does not allow any application to track your location in the background.

In the end, we would like to make it clear that in Islam we do not use external libraries that collect user data in our applications, but rather that we are in Today's prayer times application We never use any external libraries and the application does not even connect to the Internet, and it works even without giving the site permission in the background, and this application is free as a charity that we ask God to accept.


Why do you think Muslim site data is important to the US military, share your opinion with us in the comments

Source:

vice

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