Location tracking is the sort of thing that the vast majority of people tend to have a negative opinion of, and Apple has been trying quite hard to make it so that it would become more difficult for companies to track the locations of their various users. It turns out that Google is joining in on this crusade as well, and the prime target that the companies have in their sights at this current point in time is X-Mode Social.
If you’ve never heard of this company it’s probably because of the fact that it doesn’t try to publicize what it does all that much. Suffice it to say that it provides a lot of the code that location tracking requires, but now both Google and Apple are making it so that developers would need to remove the code that this company provides from their apps in order to be available on both major app stores.
With all of that having been said and now out of the way, it is important to note that the apps that generally use this code are what make this sort of thing fairly concerning. Around 400 apps use the SDK that allows them to implement X-Mode Social’s location tracking code, and a lot of them are targeted towards Muslims including dating sites and prayer timing apps. The fact that X-Mode Social also collaborates with the US military including selling a lot of data to them, this starts to seem quite sinister all in all.
Whether or not this company is being used by the US military to spy on Muslims is a matter of serious debate, but the fact of the matter is that Google and Apple clearly do not agree that this is a good policy and they are requiring apps to ask users for permission before they can start location tracking.
H/T: Wsj.
Read next: Amazon Has Surpassed Facebook In Tracking Reach, While Google Remains The No.1 Company To Be Following You Around The Web
If you’ve never heard of this company it’s probably because of the fact that it doesn’t try to publicize what it does all that much. Suffice it to say that it provides a lot of the code that location tracking requires, but now both Google and Apple are making it so that developers would need to remove the code that this company provides from their apps in order to be available on both major app stores.
With all of that having been said and now out of the way, it is important to note that the apps that generally use this code are what make this sort of thing fairly concerning. Around 400 apps use the SDK that allows them to implement X-Mode Social’s location tracking code, and a lot of them are targeted towards Muslims including dating sites and prayer timing apps. The fact that X-Mode Social also collaborates with the US military including selling a lot of data to them, this starts to seem quite sinister all in all.
Whether or not this company is being used by the US military to spy on Muslims is a matter of serious debate, but the fact of the matter is that Google and Apple clearly do not agree that this is a good policy and they are requiring apps to ask users for permission before they can start location tracking.
H/T: Wsj.
Read next: Amazon Has Surpassed Facebook In Tracking Reach, While Google Remains The No.1 Company To Be Following You Around The Web
