X-Mode social

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
X-Mode Social
Industrydata location broker
Founded2013
FounderJoshua Anton
Headquarters
Reston
,
Virginia
Area served
worldwide
Key people
Joshua Anton (CEO), Jacob Ellenburg (co-founder and chief marketing officer), Peter Connolly (data manager),
Websitehttps://xmode.io/

X-Mode Social is a US company founded in 2013 and specialized in location data and based in Reston, Virginia. In August 2021, the company was bought to Digital Envoy.[1]

Joshua Anton, a student at the University of Virginia, created a mobile application named Drunk Mode to prevent users from dialling phone numbers or texting while inebriated. The application was free and has more than one million downloads.[2] He came up with the idea of collecting data from the application's users and reselling it to advertisers and founded X-Mode in 2013.[3]

The company is based in Reston, a city that is part of the Dulles Technology Corridor, a cluster of companies hosting many firms active in defence and technology. The company offers a software development kit (SDK), a library that facilitates the functionality of the applications, which once installed in code allows access to the location data of the owners of these phones once the application is installed.[4] In total, X-Mode works with more than 70 developers on more than 300 applications such as games, travel guides, dating sites, ... In total more than 50 million active people per month are sharing their location every 5 to 7 minutes.[5] Location data is obtained from GPS data, data from Bluetooth signals emitted by the phone and picked up via detection beacons and data from Wi-Fi routers especially inside buildings and available through the permission settings and permissions granted to downloaded applications.[6]

X-Mode pays for its development kit for location tracking data to be integrated into mobile applications, providing a source of revenue for developers. For example, in September 2018, the company offered $100,000 to Scruff, a dating site for gay and bisexual men, to integrate its library into the code, which its founder refused.[7]

In Spring 2020, the company made a demonstration using the tracking of location data from phones of users can showing how when the social distancing is neglected the infection can spread.[8][9] In order to facilitate the monitoring of compliance with home quarantine orders, the company shares location data with federal agencies such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.[3]

Critics[]

In November 2020, an article published by Vice reported that data from Muslim Pro, an application for Muslims that had been downloaded 98 million times, were allegedly shared by X-Mode with a U.S. military intelligence contractor.[10] Muslim Pro then announced that it would stop transferring this data to X-Mode and user complaints were filed in France and the United Kingdom.[11][12]

In December 2020, Google and Apple asked the developers to remove the SDK from any code otherwise their apps will be eliminated from their app stores.[13]

In January 2022, an analysis made by The Markup indicated that 107 applications in 140 countries for which X-mode sent location data to X-mode. For some apps, the X-mode SDK was not necessary, the data was sent directly to the data broker[14]

References[]

  1. ^ York, Byron Tau in Washington and Patience Haggin in New (2021-08-04). "WSJ News Exclusive | Location-Data Broker X-Mode to Be Bought by Digital Envoy". Wall Street Journal. ISSN 0099-9660. Retrieved 2021-08-08.
  2. ^ Knutson, Ryan (2016-01-26). "Can These Apps Stop You From 'Drunk Texting'?". Wall Street Journal. ISSN 0099-9660. Retrieved 2020-12-07.
  3. ^ a b Haggin, Sam Schechner, Kirsten Grind and Patience (2020-06-15). "Tech Firms Are Spying on You. In a Pandemic, Governments Say That's OK". Wall Street Journal. ISSN 0099-9660. Retrieved 2020-12-07.
  4. ^ "Private Intel Firm Buys Location Data to Track People to their 'Doorstep'". www.vice.com. Retrieved 2020-12-07.
  5. ^ "Change the World Webinar Series: Leveraging Location Data for Good - Castor Ventures Conversation with X-Mode CEO, Joshua Anton". Alumni Ventures Group. Retrieved 2020-12-07.
  6. ^ Reardon, Joel. "Proximity Tracing in an Ecosystem of Surveillance Capitalism – The AppCensus Blog". Retrieved 2020-12-07.
  7. ^ "Phone tracking is having a moment, but gay dating app Scruff wants no part of it". Protocol. 2020-04-06. Retrieved 2020-12-08.
  8. ^ editor, Alex Hern Technology (2020-04-02). "Experts warn of privacy risk as US uses GPS to fight coronavirus spread". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077. Retrieved 2020-12-08. {{cite news}}: |last= has generic name (help)
  9. ^ This company tracks millions of devices worldwide. Could it help fight Covid-19? - CNN Video, retrieved 2020-12-08
  10. ^ "How the U.S. Military Buys Location Data from Ordinary Apps". www.vice.com. Retrieved 2020-12-07.
  11. ^ "UK-based couple threaten legal action over Muslim Pro data sharing". Middle East Eye. Retrieved 2020-12-07.
  12. ^ "French app users sue Muslim Pro over alleged data sharing with US military". Middle East Eye. Retrieved 2020-12-07.
  13. ^ Tau, Byron (2020-12-09). "WSJ News Exclusive | Apple and Google to Stop X-Mode From Collecting Location Data From Users' Phones". Wall Street Journal. ISSN 0099-9660. Retrieved 2020-12-09.
  14. ^ Keegan, Jon; Ng, Alfred. "Gay/Bi Dating App, Muslim Prayer Apps Sold Data on People's Location to a Controversial Data Broker – The Markup". themarkup.org. Retrieved 2022-01-30.
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