How the Muslim Pro app found itself at the heart of a scandal

The Muslim Pro app has been downloaded by 98 million Muslims around the world.

© RFI / Aurore Lartigue

Text by: Gabrielle Maréchaux Follow

4 min

The Singaporean app, which has been downloaded by 98 million Muslims around the world, lets believers know the time of prayers, the direction of Mecca, mosques or halal restaurants nearby.

But an investigation by the American media Motherboard assures that the data and the geolocation of users have been sold to the American army.

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With our correspondent in South-East Asia,

The

actually shed light on the ties between the Muslim Pro app and a data broker.

Then how it works with private American defense service providers.

The US military is at the end of this chain of actors.

The first link is of course the user of this application.

Intermediaries

When he downloaded the app, he had to agree to enable geolocation.

It seems logical for a service that gives the direction of Mecca or even the exact time of the five Muslim prayers in your location.

If he is a scrupulous and English-speaking user, he may have read the terms of use and the rules of confidentiality of the Singaporean application, written in 2017 and 2014. It will have taken him at least 30 minutes watch in hand, but he will not have learned much about the affair which agitates Muslim Pro today.

The application does not hide the possible sharing of data from third parties, but does not mention the name of the X-Mode broker.

However, this company is the link between the Muslim Pro application and various American defense service providers.

Network analysis software allowed Motherboard to prove this, US Senator Ron Wyden also claims to have had confirmation that this company sells mobile data to US military customers.

These data are certainly anonymous.

But the American media Motherboard notes in its article that it is easy, for who knows how to do it, to remove this anonymity. 

Anti-terrorism and cybersecurity

Contacted by Motherboard, X-Mode claims to have contracts in the fields of anti-terrorism, cybersecurity or to predict future clusters of Covid-19.

This is not the first time that mobile data has been used for military purposes.

In 2015, the Intercept media had already clarified the role of individual phone tracing to plan drone attacks.

A process which was not considered infallible at the time and which was at the origin of numerous civilian casualties in foreign operations. 

The Muslim Pro app reacted to these revelations quite ambiguously, initially denying selling data to the US military.

Something of which she has never been accused because the journalistic investigation explains the number of intercessors between the application and the Pentagon.

But she also promised to stop collaborating with broker X-Mode.

Finally, ironically, an interview with the French founder of this application reveals one of the company's slogans: "

".

A phrase more relevant than ever.

►Also read: Personal data: Apple wants to drive out intrusive applications 

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