Muslim prayer app Salaat First is selling user data

Another popular Muslim prayer smartphone application is tracking the location of its users and selling data that ends up in the hands of the US government, said a media report.

Salaat First, an app that reminds Muslims when to pray, was recording and selling location data of its users, according to Motherboard, an online magazine owned by the American-Canadian Vice Media group.

The company collecting the location data is a French firm called Predicio, which has been linked to a supply chain of data involving a US government contractor that has worked with a number of US agencies.

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Some of the agencies the contractor has worked with included Customs and Border Protection – the largest federal law enforcement agency of the US Department of Homeland Security – Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).

Salaat First, which has been downloaded more than 10 million times on Android, can potentially track its Muslim users' location that includes places of worship.

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Last November, it was reported that Muslim Pro, another smartphone application that was downloaded over 98 million times, gathered user location data, and sold it to the US military.

The most popular app among those involved in this kind of data trade is a Muslim prayer and Quran app which has been downloaded nearly 100 billion times.