Prayer apps: user data not secure

Thursday, November 26th, 2020

Pray.com data has been ‘leaked’ without owners’ knowledge and Muslim Pro prayer app location data has been on-sold to companies who passed the information to U.S. military contractors, separate reports say.

An investigation published by Vice News found that Muslim Pro was among hundreds of smartphone apps that have been providing their users’ location data to private companies.

These third-party data brokers sold that anonymized location data to various contractors, who then provided it to the U.S. military.

Vice’s investigation found the U.S. Special Operations Command, a branch of the military responsible for counterterrorism, counterinsurgency and special reconnaissance, purchased location data mined from the apps to support overseas missions.

Muslim Pro denied that it has sold personal user data to the U.S. military. But it confirmed that the app shared anonymized data with third party company X-Mode. X-mode then on-sold the data to the U.S. Special Operations Command.

“The trust of millions of brothers and sisters of the Ummah put in Muslim Pro every day means everything to us,” Muslim Pro wrote in a statement.

Muslim Pro has stopped selling user data to X-Mode, a move that came after thousands of social media comments from Muslims worldwide.

Pray.com, a Christian faith app has been “leaking” user data, researchers from cybersecurity firm vpnMentor told Fox News.

“Pray.com’s developers failed to properly secure vast amounts of data collected from the app,” Ran Locar of vpnMentor’s research team told Fox News. The leak potentially exposed users to fraud and online attacks.

“We don’t know if anyone has actually accessed data and downloaded it. [This is] a very strong privacy lesson,” Locar said.

“If an app asks for permission, it will grab the data, and the data is no longer in your control.”

“When using an app on any device, carefully review the permissions it’s requesting and find out for what purpose they’re needed. If an app asks for access that doesn’t make sense, you can refuse,” vpnMentor said in the research note.