Assalamu alaikum, Privacy International recently published a report on data sharing practices of a list of android apps. The full list of applications they tracked is available here. Of particular interest to the community would be the following apps featured:
- Muslim Pro: https://privacyinternational.org/node/2495
- Qibla Connect: https://privacyinternational.org/node/2506
- Salatuk: https://privacyinternational.org/node/2502
These 3 interact with Facebook upon simply opening the apps. Without any further user interaction, the following data is passed to Facebook.
- Which Application is installed.
- Location of the user.
- Model of the user's phone.
- An advertiser ID which is a unique ID connected to your device.
The data is transmitted to Facebook even if you don't have a facebook account. The transmission occurs the moment user opens the app for the first time.
Why is this a matter of concern?
- Facebook is a data collection organisation that has quite a reputation for implementing machine learning algorithms to find patterns about individuals, even those who don't use Facebook social media, and passing them to interested government agencies and any parties willing to pay for this.
- Even if we forget the entity called facebook from the equation, this practice must be called out for what it is - spying, plain and simple.
What can you do?
- There are free and open source alternatives for the above apps in F-droid
- Those of you who are familiar with android platform development, please consider developing our advancing open source applications for the community in your free time. It would be a deed that will speak for you, Lord permitting.
- Consider supporting efforts like what I said above.
- Enthusiasts among you might replicate the tests conducted for these apps for other apps and publish results.
Admittedly it is not an attack specifically aimed at Islam, but I thought the community might be interested in knowing.
Salatuk app developers has released a new version that doesn't automatically transmit such data as per their claims. Need verification. I emailed other two for a response, so far there is none.
NB: Shoutout to u/PrivacyIntl for their admirable work
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from Islam http://bit.ly/2GuwvDk
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