By Andrew Brown
Would you want to share with advertising companies the secrets you thought you were sharing only with God?
The spread of prayer apps that rely on a mixture of advertising and subscription revenue to make money is causing increasing concern after one of the biggest, Pray.com — downloaded more than five million times for Android devices and 10 million on the Apple store — was discovered to be working up the data its users unwittingly supplied with the help of other companies to make them easier to target with advertisements.
Pray.com told BuzzFeed News that it did not share prayers or specific content with third parties for commercial purposes.
A rival, Glorify, recently raised $40m in funding from Silicon Valley investors. They weren’t putting their money in for evangelistic reasons.
Muslim prayer apps are also big business. Motherboard, the reporting arm of Vice News Tech, revealed in 2020 that the US military was found to be buying location data about the 98 million users of the Muslim Pro app. Muslim Pro vigorously denied the claims, and cut ties with a company involved in selling location data.
In January this year, Motherboard reported that the Salaat First: Prayer Times app, downloaded 10 million times on Android, was also selling on location data collected by a company formerly associated with American law enforcement agencies. The developer, Hicham Boushaba, reportedly confirmed the link to the company, but said it was only activated if downloaded in the UK, Germany, France or Italy.
A Religion Media Centre panel, convened to discuss this in an online briefing, heard that the threats were more subtle but also wider ranging than most people understood.
Smartphones by their nature collect a huge amount of data about their users — they keep track of where they are, what they watch and read and listen to and what they search for on the internet.
Dr Beth Singler, a researcher into AI and the forms that spirituality takes on the internet, pointed out that intelligence agencies did not just look at individual behaviour now, but employed algorithms that will try to find patterns emerging from the behaviour of hundreds of thousands of people, such as the users of a Muslim prayer app.
“If you’re looking for specific verses in the Quran and someone else who has been involved in nefarious acts also looks at those same verses, a correlation could be highlighted, and you will be seen as a person of interest,” she said.
Maria Farrell, a Catholic who has worked in internet governance for 20 years, added that this kind of algorithmic use was quite different from the targeted and warranted surveillance of individuals.
“This is trawling through pools of data to try to find profiles, find connections, find people who are not specifically either individually or as a group suspected of any wrongdoing. We’re trying to build profiles on a whole population. And that is problematic for anyone who’s worried about human rights”, she said.
On the other hand, Jason Pridmore, at the Erasmus School of History, Culture and Communication in Rotterdam, has worked on the intersection of religion and surveillance in several countries. He pointed out that advertisers, at least, were not interested in consumers as individuals.
“Most companies just want to use the knowledge that they have to move their advertising response rate from 4 per cent to 4.1 per cent. But your Tesco club card knows that if they offer you things in too specific a way it gets really creepy. They’re quite happy that they’ve targeted you a little bit better, because they happen to know that you have this religious proclivity and relationships with others.”
Still, there is something very disturbing about the idea that prayers and Bible readings, which are meant to be the most intimate conversations with God, are being used to sell things.
“From a consumerist standpoint,” Ms Farrell said, “if you’re trying to find a prayer app that is less likely to abuse your data, you should probably look at one that is has a real-life religious community, in the real world, behind it.”
But she cautioned that individual choices did not solve structural problems. Asked whether there was a structural solution, she said: “Yes, absolutely. Burn the internet to the ground.
“The current version of it is completely historically contingent on a market-based set of choices that say we cannot possibly have an internet unless we use the version of it that was invented circa 2008, that basically says you can have anything you want, but you have to allow us to surveil you and build profiles of you, and sell that data to other people to do whatever they like with. This is part of a very, very big question.”
Some reassurance was given by Emma Holland, creative manager of the British Jesuit prayer app Pray as You Go: “We always wanted to treat our users very tenderly, and not transactionally,” she said. “So, we don’t collect data beyond significant data that we would ordinarily collect through Google Analytics and necessary cookies.
“We don’t have a subscription. People don’t need to sign up. We know location, we know, vaguely age ranges, and gender, but we don’t know people’s names. Beyond a sort of general shape of what our audience look like, we feel we don’t need to know any data beyond that interest of who’s listening and who it’s helping and reaching.”
It is, of course, a big part of the model of commercial prayer apps that they encourage the feeling of community among their users, just as everything else does now.
In the end, Dr Pridwell said, it was the real-life communities that set the patterns for the virtual ones. Hardly anyone looked at the privacy policies, he said. They would use whatever their friends or their pastor recommended and worry about their privacy later, if at all.
