Muslim Prayer App Accused of Selling User Location Data to US Government Agencies

Salaat First, a prayer time app downloaded more than ten million times worldwide, sold the location data of its users to Predicio, a French company specializing in the analysis and processing of anonymous mobile user data, revealed Motherboard. According to this media, this company would be linked to a complex supply chain of data in which Venntel, an American provider that resells data to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency (ICE), the Customs and Border Protection Service (CBP) and the FBI, is notably involved.

Motherboard claims that this new case "not only highlights the use of religious applications to collect location data, but also the ease with which this sensitive information is exchanged in the location data industry. Motherboard conceals certain details about the dataset, such as its exact size, in order to protect the source, but it is clear that users of an app intended for Muslims are likely being tracked without their informed consent".

Hicham Boushaba, developer of Salaat First, acknowledged having transmitted the location data of his users to Predicio since March 2020. He also explained that they only concerned those who had downloaded the app in the United Kingdom, Germany, France or Italy. According to him, the data collection undertaken by Predicio was suspended in October 2020, and the partnership with the same company ended on December 6, 2020 as a precautionary measure due to information implicating the practices of Venntel and X-Mode.

For its part, the French company is defending itself. "Predicio does not support any government, commercial or private action aimed at using data collection to identify an ethnic, religious or political group in order to track or identify a person of any kind. We do not tolerate the abuse of our solutions in use cases that do not correspond to our moral, social and ethical and global code of conduct," can be read on its website.

"In light of these latest revelations, the owners of all major Muslim apps should thoroughly examine how their businesses manage user data," Nihad Awad, director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), told Motherboard. "Companies should publicly acknowledge any identified sale of user data that may have been obtained by government entities, and then take transparent steps to ensure it does not happen again," he added.