Digital Data Privacy Inequalities Amongst Ethnic and Religious Minorities

-- By AhmedImam - 23 Mar 2022

Introduction

All around the United States, millions of Muslims pray five times a day across the country's three different timezones. The Muslim call to prayer, the Athan, comes at five specific times each day. In Muslim countries, residents tend to rely on the many mosques located within their neighborhoods to know when it is time for prayer. In the U.S., one doesn't typically hear this call to prayer even from the many various mosques located around cities. The innovation of the smartphones has generally aided this process for Muslims with apps like Muslim Pro, which give alerts and Athans for each prayer time. The application also provides Muslims with a digital compass, which orients itself towards the Kabbah in Mecca that Muslims are required to pray in directions towards. When prayers are done, the application even has an in-app Quran that lets users pick up exactly where they left off. These features and many more are examples of the many conveniences that modern day technology has brought for societies at large. However, at what cost might these conveniences come? Indeed, as news broke out in 2020 about Muslim Pro's data collection and subsequent sales practices, Muslims in western countries across the globe were understandably alarmed. This essay will aim to examine how applications like Muslim Pro and many others may be abusing users' dependence on them, thereby sabotaging users' privacy in exchange for monetary gain.

The Muslim Pro Debacle

An investigation by the online magazine Motherboard found the US military was procuring location data from several popular apps, including Muslim Pro.The application has over 98 million downloads worldwide, and the popular tech publication Motherboard published a report highlighting the U.S. government's targeted tracking of specific religious or ethnic groups. A company called Babel Street created a product called Locate X, which the U.S. Special Operations Command (USSOCOM) bought access to for its "counterterrorism, counterinsurgency, and special reconnaissance" efforts. Another company, called X-Mode, obtains data directly from smartphone applications and then sells that data to contractors, including the U.S. government and military. By doing so, both the government and military gain access to users' location data and app usage data. This practice is not exclusive to Muslim Pro, as even another popular application called Muslim Mingle, a popular dating app for Muslims globally, has also been found to sell data to X-Mode that subsequently gets sent to contractors.

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The Response

Ethnic minorities in the United States already do not feel safe. The many stakeholders embedded into the infrastructure of this country's system have proven themselves time and time again to acquiesce to injustices against ethnic minorities. Post 9/11, the political and social atmosphere for Muslims has also been traumatic to say the least. After news broke out that the U.S. military is now tracking Muslims across the world, this anxiety is only heightened. Indeed, The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the nation’s largest Muslim civil liberties and advocacy group, sent letters to three U.S. House committee chairs asking them to investigate the U.S. military’s purchase of location and movement data of users of Muslim-oriented apps. CAIR called for legislation prohibiting government agencies from purchasing user data that would otherwise require a warrant. There is a clear psychological impact of surveillance that people tend to either get used to or face anxiety from. Every single American should have the right to practice their religion without being spied on. Muslims are no exception, and their constitutional rights should remain protected.

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