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.
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
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
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.
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Thank you for this nice topic
Thanks for the important note, if you would kindly clarify the main points to protect privacy and also how dangerous this topic is, now, explicitly, the devices are in the hands of everyone, professionals and simple people. God bless everyone
A very large monument to the peoples,
Thank you for the informative and educational article
I hope that everyone in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Palestine, Jordan, Syria, Iraq, Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria and all Arab countries will be wary of these explosive applications.
God suffices their evil
May Allah reward you
Oh phone, Islam holds what we fear almost weekly. News of espionage, penetration and accusations in countries. Your presence in the applications I bless you.
You did well, and may God bless you and thank you for your efforts
The truth is, the Muslim Pro app is not basically free, and the misfortune is that I am an annual subscriber. I mean, we pay money and spy on us !!
How does your app work without the user's current location data?
* Excellent article with clear translation
God bless you, and God suffices us and the best agent
There is a fallacy in the article: "Muslim Pro" is not completely free. Rather, the annual subscription fee is very high compared to its content and similar programs.
I think the developer is very greedy as he sells his customers' data to those who give and bear.
As long as the buyer pays for the software, the developer has no excuse whatsoever.
Praise be to God for the blessing of science. I thank you for this sufficiently detailed scientific article.
You have fully explained the truth
I removed several programs and relied on the program but my links
I ask God to grant you success and repayment. You are on a loophole and your work is a lot of good for the nation, and if the benefit of what you are doing now does not appear, then tomorrow, God willing, the benefit of your wonderful efforts will be shown and the best proof of that is this problem.
May Allah reward you all the best
What will the US Army benefit from if it knows that I go out at XNUMX a.m. to my work, then come back from it at XNUMX o'clock and go to the grocery store to buy bread, then go to the mosque and pray and come back and repeat the same money day after day ??
Any murder that is taking place in the world now with religious motives, for sure, without a doubt, the perpetrator will be a deviant Muslim
Crimes against the West increased, and most of the perpetrators were Muslims
In the end, sure, governments will monitor any Muslim person and he will be under suspicion by the authorities
This is their right
God does not reconcile everyone who established the basis of this approach based on expiation and murder just because of disagreement or just because one of them published abusive cartoons
Brother Nasser, everyone who founded this curriculum is now present, arriving and touring the Persian Gulf, Egypt and other places in the leading Islamic centers in Al-Azhar and Dar Al Iftaa in Saudi Arabia and others .. These teachings are still taught until now and most Muslim scholars walk on them
What should we do? What are the best apps to use? Do I delete Muslim Pro app or not? What is the solution
ISIS is not from Islam at all !!!
Give me a religious institution that infidels ISIS
؟
Al-Azhar and all Muslim scholars say ISIS is Islam and their atonement is not valid
Another thing is not to be dependent and aim the problems of Islamic terrorism on the West and the Jews
That is, the evidence, Mr. Sistani, who represents the authority in Najaf, demanded in his speech that the youth volunteer to eliminate ISIS, and then the youth answered the call and fought ISIS
Search modified two-dimensional puzzle
ISIS, Boko Haram, the Muslim youth, the rule of the Shiite militias, and Khomeini's ideology ,, all of this and say their number is not small بالق
ISIS is not from Islam in anything
ISIS is a weapon that the West, US intelligence and Western media have used to tarnish the image of Muslims to challenge Islam
Under the pretext of ISIS - where has ISIS XNUMX years ago ?? We don't know ISIS until recently
My brother, why don't we hear about ISIS Crusaders, when they were killed in Algeria 🇩🇿 More than XNUMX million martyrs
Or ISIS Buddhist or Jewish why?
Because the goal 🎯 is to distort the image of what is Islamic to challenge its dimension in the curriculum itself
The subject is shocking, sensitive, and frightening, how does that happen!
Mleisa and the Lord of the Kaaba
The previous comment is not in response to Brother Al-Mahri, but rather to Brother Hassan
I think so, and you came in the place of the fella, I mean, in my place
The security of peoples and the protection of the innocent are more important than privacy and anything
Extremist Muslims are Sunnis and their Shiites are infidel moderate Muslims
And the people of the book are infidels
And the rest of the world is infidelity
And the number of these extremists is not small, so every government has a duty to pursue this stray thought and eradicate it in various ways
And eliminate them anywhere in the world
By this logic, I mean that there is no infidelity of people ..😂
Extremist Muslims, Sunnis and Shiites !? And their number is not small!? How
Review your thoughts carefully before asking such things
The days still prove to us that non-Muslims are the terrorists, and you say Muslims ?!
Your likes are the ones who give the red light to France and other infidel countries to mock our Islam
There is no point in talking to him, his only aim is to stir up controversy
May God bless you, and may God reward you for us
Where is the safety and privacy, I do not see it
ممتاز
I think that non-social programs are not afraid of collecting the site, because if we said that a prayer or Qur’an program knew your site, how it seemed to steal your information, this topic is exaggerated and terrible.
The Almighty said: “They want to extinguish the light of God through their mouths, and God is the fullest of His light, even if the unbelievers hate it.” The truthfulness of God Almighty,
Very cool article thank you ..
The topic is very sensitive and considered a violation of privacy
Thank you for reporting the news that concerns us as Muslims
Oh Phone Islam Company, if you allow selling all of your personal information to the Americans, we do not have a special problem. I’m all of this feeling and knowing information. My life, I don’t have a problem, but the most important thing is that you don’t leave all com’s programs with money
My brother, tell about yourself and do not generalize, many people, including myself, do not want all our information, movements and housing to be sold and bought in the markets and used to exploit us or to target us, perhaps for halal earnings, or to blackmail us and steal our money.
I think that this is why we noticed that prayer programs are true things, I mean, they do not leave money. One of the developers of the programs tells me.
Privacy no one saves to its owner
Except for its owner
Thank you very much for raising such topics to alert the user to protect his privacy
We hope to find Arab alternatives that maintain privacy as your distinctive applications
Exactly, if you are not paying the commodity then you are the commodity !!
And since you entered the network, there is no privacy!
A thousand thousand thousand greetings and appreciation
We are monitored in all cases, both by the applications and by the telecom companies that we are subscribed to
Therefore, we must be careful and not make the mobile of whatever type the reference for our privacy ...
Perhaps also observers from the operating systems iOS, Android macos, windows, and of course the companies will not expose themselves, but rather tell you: We protect your privacy
Who are you?
Are you the owner of the relativity theory?
Or the Darwinian theory?
The ignorant Arab nations are dependent on the West for everything, and if they left us a month without their pharmaceutical and industry production, we would return to the Middle Ages
What I read in this article regarding espionage by collecting user data for some applications is very reasonable, logical and sure to serve the American intelligence services, and I personally decided to delete the application and ask the people in charge of the Islamic iPhone application to pay attention to this. Kind of information and its communication to their customers and thanks
I like the article because it is true. I search for a specific drug on Google, and after a day the same drug comes out in blackjack. I was very surprised. Two dimensions, I understood how the tracking policy and others.
Even an article like this you used to attack Google and brag about the safety of Apple and it defends privacy. What is Google’s fault in it. These are private apps and not like Google. Google is a very respectable company that has provided the world with things that Apple cannot offer something simple. You may also be collecting data, but for your benefit
Where is the paragraph that Google attacked us in? Weird for you to understand that we are attacking Google from an article like this
As much as the pain is the screaming, do not cry and google
My brother Tariq, with my condolences, you always say Google and Facebook sell data, and if you do not pay for the commodity, then you are the commodity, and you ignore that Google and Facebook have made the technical life easy and provided great services to the world. My brother, the problem is not in Google and Facebook. The problem is with hackers, internet pirates and fraudsters. If they get your data, they will misuse it, but Google And Facebook is well-known companies and their policies are clear and used by billions around the world. They may collect data in order to improve their services and ads, and this is not bad. You may benefit from some ads. Please look at the positive side more.
The best response to fools is silence
He has the right to stalk information, no more or less, and nothing is free
Google steals more information than it provides useful services
Your words are correct, if you do not pay for the commodity, you will be the commodity, but not always, my brother.
Certainly, thinking should not be misunderstood about the brothers and sisters who are responsible for the concerned applications, but be careful, as the presenter of the product is not always a brother or sister. At the beginning of this millennium, the Americans used forums with an Islamic identity and an eloquent Arab tongue as a trap for members of groups who are looking for them!