Apps Marketed to US Troops Are Shipping Chinese and Russian Code
A recent examination of hundreds of mobile apps marketed toward US military personnel found more than one in eight contained software built by companies in
A recent examination of hundreds of mobile apps marketed toward US military personnel found more than one in eight contained software built by companies in China, Russia, or other foreign nations, raising fresh concerns that adversary governments could harvest data revealing where service members live, work, and deploy. According to researchers at Purdue University, the US Military Academy at West Point, and Florida International University, one popular app used by service members to rate living conditions on their own bases include code from Huawei, the Chinese telecom that US regulators flagged as a national security threat in 2020. Two others were built by Russian companies and incorporate the Russian ad service Yandex. The largely unregulated industry that tracks Americans online treats civilians and service members mostly the same—unless there is profit in telling them apart—despite evidence that exposure can reveal troop deployments, unit movements, and the routines of personnel within intelligence facilities and hardened shelters where nuclear weapons are believed to be stored.
WIRED investigations have previously shown location data harvested from ordinary apps tracing US service members to their homes, their children's schools, and off-base establishments where troops are prohibited from being seen. Experts have warned the same data could aid foreign spies in identifying personnel with access to sensitive sites, map when a facility is least guarded, or surface other compromising details. The stakes are no longer hypothetical. In April, US Central Command acknowledged in a letter to Senator Ron Wyden that it had received multiple threat reports of adversaries exploiting commercial location data to target or surveil American personnel in the Middle East, where US forces remain locked in a standoff with the Iranian military over the Strait of Hormuz. Lawmakers called it the first official confirmation that troops in an active war zone were being hunted through the data-broker economy—a threat the Pentagon's own contractors and researchers had warned about for nearly a decade.
The new study takes a first look at one piece of that exposure: what actually sits inside the apps built and marketed specifically for the military. "We are grateful for the opportunity to bring greater attention to these issues,” says Joshua Shinkle, a Purdue University PhD researcher and the study’s lead author. “We hope the research helps military-affiliated personnel, developers, and platforms make more informed privacy decisions and encourages continued discussion with developers, platforms, and policymakers about how to address these gaps.” The researchers examined more than 220 such apps—from uniform guides and promotion-exam prep to banking and dating apps—pulled from the Google Play store and military subreddits. Nearly two-thirds—or 64 percent—contained third-party code, known as SDKs: prebuilt software components, typically used for analytics and, that can also track user behavior, including their locations, and share that information with outside companies. Forty percent of the apps collected or shared more data than they disclosed in their Google or Apple store listings, the researchers found.
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