Comment by mschuster91

The consistency is that the presence of a Reddit app or a Youtube app per se doesn't reveal too much about the device owner.

A Bible reader/tracker app, a Quran learning app... now that's where you enter a more sensitive area, religious beliefs are among the higher protected classes of data under GDPR.

And now there's a few potential threat sources: family members snooping through their relative's phones, border control snooping through phones (remember, apostasy is a crime punishable by death in some Muslim countries), or the worst one, random ad SDKs pulling in and distributing lists of installed APKs and pushing these to the mothership, where the data can then be hoovered up by anyone willing to pay for it, with the same result [1].

I wish I didn't need to write this, but it's not just some random Middle East theocracy going for its citizens as usual for the crime of not believing into the god of choice, we're seeing people being threatened for their faith (or lack of it) right in the United States of America, right now.

[1] https://theintercept.com/2025/05/22/intel-agencies-buying-da...