Investigation: US military buys granular movement data of people around the world from a wide array of apps for Muslim dating, prayer, Craigslist, weather, more
A Muslim prayer app with over 98 million downloads is one of the apps connected to a wide-ranging supply chain … Tweets: @rowaida_abdel and @jmbooyah Tweets: Rowaida Abdelaziz / @rowaida_abdel : Muslim Pro, the Muslim prayer app with over 98 million downloads is one of the apps connected to a wide-ranging supply chain that sends ordinary people's personal data to brokers, contractors, and the military. I hate that I'm shocked but damn https://twitter.com/... Johana Bhuiyan / @jmbooyah : This is a HUGE deal for Muslims. So many people use this app for prayer times, Qibla direction, etc & they're selling location data that military & other contractors have access to. If you work at Muslim Pro & want to talk to me anonymously pls reach out to me. Signal # in bio. https://twitter.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
The VICE investigation traces how prayer apps like Muslim Pro feed users' precise location to data brokers who resell it down a supply chain that ends at US military contractors — meaning people's daily movements, including mosque visits implied by prayer-time usage, are obtainable without any warrant or court order.
This is not an isolated finding: the same reporting thread later surfaced in [[a:1155105|Google Play removing dozens of Muslim prayer apps after researchers tied them to a US defense contractor]], and the Wall Street Journal separately flagged how app-harvested geolocation endangers even US military personnel's own phones.
First-order effects
- Muslim Pro, with over 98 million downloads, faces immediate scrutiny of its data-sharing practices from the very users whose prayer times and Qibla lookups generated the location trail.
- The named brokers and contractors in the chain now have their customer relationship with the US military exposed publicly, forcing each party to defend a purchase that required no legal authorization to make.
Second-order effects
- Other popular apps serving Muslim users come under pressure to disclose or sever broker relationships, as the Salaat First/Predicio pattern shows the practice extends well beyond one app.
- App stores and platform gatekeepers face demands to police SDK-level data flows, since the collection happens inside ordinary utilities — weather, dating, classifieds — that users never associate with surveillance.
Third-order effects
- If commercial data purchases keep substituting for lawful intercept authority, the likely structural response is regulation aimed specifically at the broker middle layer rather than at apps or the government buyer alone.
- Communities identifiable through their app choices — here, Muslims — bear concentrated exposure, raising the stakes from privacy harm to targeted surveillance of a religious group as a systemic risk.
The trend: Consumer app telemetry is becoming a de facto government surveillance channel, with data brokers — not app stores or regulators — deciding who can buy granular movement histories.