A disturbing new CBS report reveals that Donald Trump’s 2020 campaign has an app designed to steal personal information from users.
During the 2016 Election, Trump’s campaign relied on getting personal information from voters through Facebook via Cambridge Analytica. It was a major scandal that forced Facebook to disable the features that allowed this personal information to be mined from users.
But now Trump’s team has an app developed by Phunware that does the same thing on a scale that could grab personal information from hundreds of millions of Americans, including those who have NOT downloaded the app.
According to CBS News:
President Trump’s campaign app is targeted to his most fervent supporters, but it is able to collect data about a swath of the American public far larger than his base.
The app requests access to significantly more information from each user’s phone than Joe Biden’s, and is on as many as 1.4 million devices, compared to 64,000 for Biden, according to figures provided to CBS News by Apptopia.
And the data collected from Trump’s app can be poured into an information ecosystem designed to replace the Facebook features – since disabled – that made the 2016 Cambridge Analytica scandal possible, according to a former executive for the firm that developed the app.”
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It’s pretty safe to say that Trump supporters will likely give the app permission to access their contacts, which means anti-Trump family members and friends would have their personal information accessed without their consent.
It’s “a voter surveillance tool of extraordinary power,” University of Texas-Austin researcher Jacob Gursky co-wrote in an article in the MIT Technology Review.
“By connecting you with your personal relationships, they’re able to have you blur the line between your personal life and the political and create more effective messaging than they could ever create on their own,” Gursky told CBS.
That means Trump’s campaign could have access to the phones of hundreds of millions of unsuspecting Americans.
“With 1.4 million downloads, that could result in tens of millions, maybe a hundred million plus, phone numbers,” Apptopia CEO Eliran Sapir said. “One particular permission that is probably the biggest gold mine is the phone book. That’s essentially the social network on your phone.”
The personal information gathered includes your location, what other apps you use, as well as access to photos and other files.
“They want access to everything,” former Phunware executive Ian Karnell warned. “The ability to aggregate all of the different data points that one can collect from a mobile device from a geolocation perspective: where you live, where you work, where you shop.”
It’s certainly more sinister than the app from Joe Biden’s campaign, which does not include the features that violate people’s privacy.
“The contact information is used for no other purpose and will be safely erased once the campaign concludes,” a Biden campaign official said in a statement. “Users can also decline sharing their contacts, and the app then functions more as a campaign newsfeed.”
Trump’s campaign app, on the other hand, utilizes Bluetooth to connect to devices nearby, even if they don’t have the app on them.
Trump’s team can literally track Americans and learn a whole lot more about them than they should be able to. This is big brother on steroids.
And it’s not the only plot to conduct surveillance against Americans on a wide scale as Trump recently signed an executive order giving the Department of Justice and the FTC the ability to monitor people on social media platforms.
Who knows what else Trump is doing with this personal information? One thing is for certain, it’s not good.
Featured image via Flickr/The White House, under Creative Commons license 2.0
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