Muslim prayer app Salaat First, with 10M+ Android downloads, tracks users' location in the UK, Germany, France, and Italy and sells it to data broker Predicio
this one called Salaat First with more than ten million downloads on Android — was also selling its data to contractors. One of those contractors works with ICE. https://www.vice.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
This report extends VICE's November 2020 investigation into the US military buying granular movement data from everyday apps, naming a specific pipeline: Salaat First, a Muslim prayer app with more than ten million Android downloads, collects users' precise location in the UK, Germany, France, and Italy and sells it to data broker Predicio — one of whose contractors works with ICE. The earlier coverage showed the demand side (government agencies buying app data); this piece names a supply chain running through a religious app used by millions.
The European footprint is the sharpest edge: location data on users in four EU-adjacent jurisdictions flowing to brokers and government-linked contractors echoes the pattern Privacy International flagged when [[a:937078|TripAdvisor, Kayak, and other popular Android apps shared data with Facebook without consent]], a practice it argued may violate GDPR.
First-order effects
- Salaat First's users in the UK, Germany, France, and Italy have their location sold to Predicio and, downstream, to a contractor working with ICE — meaning prayer habits and movement patterns of Muslim users are exposed to immigration-enforcement-adjacent buyers.
- Predicio and Salaat First are directly exposed to GDPR liability, since the data subjects are in European jurisdictions and the reporting indicates the data sharing happened without meaningful user consent.
Second-order effects
- Google Play faces pressure to police the data-broker ecosystem on its platform, a scrutiny that later materialized when [[a:1155105|it removed dozens of Android apps including Muslim prayer apps with 10M+ downloads over malware tied to a US defense contractor]] — app stores becoming the de facto enforcement layer for data-broker abuse.
- Other prayer and Muslim-community apps face forced disclosure and consent overhauls, as the VICE investigation's demand-side finding — the US military buying granular movement data from Muslim dating and prayer apps — puts every app in the category under suspicion.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the structural fix lands on intermediaries: app stores tightening permission boundaries and regulators treating location-data brokers as the chokepoint, rather than relying on individual app developers' privacy policies.
- The commercial surveillance chain — app to broker to government contractor — becomes a test case for whether GDPR-style consent regimes can reach US intelligence and enforcement buyers through European data subjects, the same question Privacy International's earlier complaints raised.
The trend: Consumer apps are monetizing precise location through data brokers with government agencies as end buyers, and enforcement is shifting to app stores and privacy regulators rather than the brokers themselves.