Case Study
Muslim Pro Users Delete the App En Masse After Military Sales Revealed
Muslim Pro, a prayer app that has been downloaded 98 million times, came under fire for sharing location data with a company called X-Mode, which sells data to clients including defense contractors, “and by extension, the [U.S.] military.” A Motherboard investigation published in November 2020 found that Muslim Pro—which notifies users about prayer times and shows their relative location to Mecca—was the most popular app among the ones connected with the sale of people’s pinpoint location information to military. The U.S. military has used other forms of location data to target deadly drone strikes in majority-Muslim counties. So Muslim Pro’s users were understandably outraged at the developers of Muslim Pro, and criticized the information sharing as simply the latest form of Muslim criminalization. Many users deleted the app in protest.