Concerns Rise As Second Muslim Prayer App Claims To Be Tracking And Selling User Locations

In November, the Muslim Pro app came under fire for leaking user data. Now, two months later, a second Muslim app is doing the same thing.

Salaat First, an app that reminds Muslims when to pray, was caught recording and selling their users’ location data to Predicio, a French tech firm that has ties to ICE, Customs and Border Protection and the FBI. Motherboard — the technology site informed of this privacy breach — isn’t releasing the size of the compromised data, but they have made it clear that this likely occurred without user consent. The data obtained contains “raw movements” of users, specifically their exact latitude and longitude on any given day.

Those using Android devices to access Salaat First are at risk of having their data sold, as the app has over 10 million downloads on Android devices. It is available on iOS, but that version of the app does not send data to Predicio.

Hicham Boushaba, the developer who created Salaat First, said data was only collected for users who downloaded the application in the UK, Germany, France, or Italy, per the agreement he reached with Predicio in March 2020.

The Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC) weighed in on the Muslim Pro controversy in November. Their stance remains that “privacy is sacred” and both Muslim Pro and Salaat First have betrayed that privacy.

Raahima Shoaib, the Communications and Marketing Manager at MPAC said, “Prayer is sacred to American Muslims and privacy is sacred to all Americans. Salaat betrays that by selling user data to companies, especially when buyers include the likes of ICE which have done irreparable harm to marginalized communities. Businesses have a duty to protect their customers, they must adapt their business policies to have more transparency.”

Following this backlash, Predicio posted on their website, saying they don’t condone “private use” of their user data. “Predicio does not support any governmental, commercial, or private use cases that aim to use business intelligence data to identify ethnic, religious, or political groups for human tracking or people identification of any sort. We do not tolerate the abuse of our solutions for the use cases that do not follow our global moral, social, and ethical code of conduct,” it read.

After information leaked of the data breach, Apple and Google removed the location tracker X-Mode from its App Stores and Muslim Pro announced they no longer share location data.

Salaat First has yet to comment on whether they will do the same.