You downloaded a prayer app to know when to face Mecca. An SDK inside the app sold your location to SafeGraph. SafeGraph sold it to the US military. The Pentagon knew which mosques you visited, when you prayed, and where you went afterwards. 100 million Muslims' worship patterns, sold for analytics. The app said "prayer times." The data said "surveillance target.". SafeGraph sold data showing which phones visited Planned Parenthood — traceable to home addresses. After Roe was overturned, that data became evidence of a crime in some states. SafeGraph kept selling it until the press found out. Your phone's location data, sold to anyone willing to pay, including people who want to know if you visited an abortion clinic.
What they claim: SafeGraph describes its location data products as anonymised analytics for businesses
What we found: Motherboard revealed in 2020 that SafeGraph sold location data harvested from Muslim prayer apps — including Muslim Pro (100M+ downloads) — to the US military and defence contractors. The data showed which devices visited mosques, when they prayed, and where they went afterwards. SafeGraph bought this data from SDKs embedded in prayer apps whose users had no idea their worship was being tracked and sold to the Pentagon.
What they claim: SafeGraph describes data as aggregated and de-identified for commercial use
What we found: SafeGraph sold location data showing visits to Planned Parenthood clinics, which could be cross-referenced with home addresses to identify individuals seeking reproductive healthcare. After the Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade, SafeGraph initially continued selling abortion clinic visit data. They stopped only after media coverage and public pressure — not because of policy or law.