We have built the greatest application ever built in the history of
politics in the world, bar none.
Millions of citizens involved in the 2020 presidential campaign, be they
organizers, volunteers or even just fervent supporters, have downloaded a
campaign app, either Vote Joe or Trump 2020.
Users give the app their phone number, thereby subscribing them to a
stream of texts, encouraging them to get more involved.
They might give the app access to their contacts, their GPS data, their
Bluetooth data. Data and campaigns have always been friends.
Where this gets complicated is, there's always the question of is this
creepy? Like, is this too much?
On the one hand, the tech isn't anything fundamentally new.
Apps from Google Maps to Angry Birds to Instagram collect tons of user
data, and advertisers have been scooping up as much of it as they can for
years. Hyper-targeted ads based on your online and in-person activity are
the norm at this point. What's new is that the politicians are catching up
to the advertisers.
Now we're starting to see this triangulation of computational power with
massive sets of data, with more sophisticated political communication
tactics, and AI leveraged in order to really target people on a more
individual level.
All of this could seem nefarious or savvy, largely depending on who you
trust. I worried a lot about whether or not we were, with our targeting
practices, leading people along to a decision that they may not have made
otherwise. And we came to the conclusion that we didn't have to worry
about this. I think that was naive.
Everyone in the world doesn't think they're persuadable.
I'm here to assure you that you are.
We weren't thoughtful. We weren't careful.
And the last eight years have shown us that we need to be.
Former President Barack Obama released the first campaign app in 2008, a
mere month before Election Day.
Made for the iPhone, which was just released the year before, the app
actually had some key similarities to those we see today.
The foundation of all of this is purely on the fact that the voter
registration data is open data.
You're very much able to get access to the data that allows you to target
people to vote, from the get-go.
The app accessed the user's contact list, highlighting friends and family
who lived in swing states and encouraging users to call them on behalf of
the campaign. GPS was a brand new feature for smartphones back then, and
the original Obama app used it to direct users to local events and
campaign offices. But then, as in now, there's no U.S.
law ensuring that data gathered for a specific purpose will only be used
for that purpose. All these tiny things, the contact list to send text
messages, the location to find rallies, all these things are collected,
centralized and out of your power how they're used.
But users were opting in and the campaign's tech savvy was lauded.
Obama built on this in 2012, using technology in ways that the political
world had never seen.
The smartphone replaced the clipboard for door-to-door campaigning, as
Obama's canvasing app gave volunteers lists of neighbors to target.
One million people gave the campaign access to their Facebook data and
their friend's Facebook data.
And Obama's email listserv topped 20 million.
Reed wondered just how much the team could ask for.
And what we found is that people trusted us.
You know, for better or for worse, I think for better, people trusted us
with that data and they just said yes to everything.
They just hadn't seen how dark it could get.
He hadn't either, but the next election cycle, the Cambridge Analytica
scandal put a spotlight on the relationship between big data and voter
manipulation. Cambridge Analytica drilled deep, looking for a trove of
social media data on Americans to help Republican presidential campaigns
fine tune their messages and win votes.
Through a third-party quiz app, t he political consulting and data analysis
firm Cambridge Analytica obtained the personal information of tens of
millions of Facebook users without their consent.
Those who downloaded the app were told their data would be used for
academic purposes, but actually it was used to build out detailed voter
profiles for both Ted Cruz and Donald Trump's presidential campaigns.
Susceptible voters were then targeted with provocative political content
and ads prior to the 2016 election.
This was a major breach of trust and I'm really sorry that this happened.
The truth came out in 2018, and the scope of the data harvesting, combined
with the fact that most hadn't opted in and didn't know how their data
would be used, angered millions.
A movement to delete Facebook started trending and conversations around
data privacy entered the mainstream.
All the while though, campaign apps were getting more sophisticated.
Clinton's 2016 app was heavily gam ified.
Users could compete against each other to earn rewards.
You could decorate your digital campaign headquarters, pet a virtual dog,
water a virtual plant.
It obviously didn't lead to victory.
B ut overall, the scandals and successes of the past decade had laid the
foundation for a robust, if concerning, digital campaign strategy.
Built by Phunware, the Austin-based mobile software company well known for
its advanced location tracking capabilities, the Trump 2020 app truly does
it all. It's a gam ified outreach tool, news aggregator, media creator and
virtual events platform with a maximalist approach to data collection.
If you want to donate money, there's a means to donate money.
If you want to tie in to a stream of all the social media discussion
that's going on, you can do that as well.
Maybe you want to man the polls, maybe you want to go door knocking, maybe
you want to do surveys.
The app requires a phone number, full name, email and zip code to sign up
and then users are asked to share their location info.
While Phunware doesn't control how the Trump campaign will choose to use
this data, Knitowski says it's proven extremely useful for targeted
advertising in the commercial space.
Location-based services are set up so that you can set very small to very
large geofences, to know when you enter or exit a geofence what should
happen based on the context of who that person is, what their interests
are, and how that brand values that customer.
So then when you extend these into the world of politics, it's really no
different. It's possible that the Trump campaign could use this
information to track user's most sensitive comings and goings.
They want to know if you're going to church on Sunday or if you're going to
the shooting range or if you're going to the abortion clinic.
And then once they have that kind of information, they can triangulate
that information with other data points that they have in order to really
get you with personalized advertising.
Woolley and his research associate, Jacob Gursky, say Trump appears to be
taking cues from India Prime Minister Narendra Modi's app.
Launched in 2015, Modi's app has been downloaded 10 million times.
The default permissions give it nearly total access to all the data on a
user's phone, and the app is often used to disseminate news and propaganda
to supporters. The Trump app and the Modi app are a piece of a media
ecosystem. They are inseparable from this idea that the mainstream media
is corrupt. This is your source for real news, not fake news.
Users see attention-grabbing articles from the campaign's media team, as
well as a curated Twitter stream of pro-Trump content.
On the App Store, Trump 2020 is actually categorized as a news app and
rated 17+ for reasons including mild profanity, crude humor, mature themes
and medical treatment information.
According to Apptopia, it has over 2.6 million downloads as of early
October. That's nearly 15 times more than Biden's campaign app, Vote Joe,
which is categorized as a social networking app appropriate for ages four
and up. The difference between even the Trump and the Biden campaign is so
profound it's not even funny.
That's the difference between building a Ferrari and having a beat up used
pickup truck. But the Biden app is a powerful tool in its own right, if
more narrow in its approach.
While Trump's app is seemingly targeted to all his supporters, Biden's is
clearly designed for one purpose - relational organizing.
That is, getting volunteers and organizers to strategically reach out to
friends and family and vote Biden.
It's a coin with two sides, right?
Like the best way to change someone's mind about something that they
believe in politically is to talk to them and to know them.
But the best way to manipulate someone is also to get someone that they
care about to share information with them.
Basically, what you think of the strategy could largely depend on the
message being peddled. But Woolley and Gursky argue that whenever
relational organizing is combined with high volume, semi-automated
outreach tools, we should be worried.
It changes with scale and it changes with automation.
So texting your grandmother to say, hey you should really register to vote
is great. But what these politicians are building around it, is this
automated system that really just turns it into a new form of propaganda.
Much like Obama's app, Vote Joe primarily wants access to user's contacts.
Once permission is granted, the app then matches this data with the
national voter file, allowing users to filter their friends and family by
political affiliation, voting history and whether or not they live in a
battleground state. The app is clear that it will not reach out to these
people. It wants you to reach out.
After all, that's what research says is most effective.
Users earn points and badges by texting contacts and encouraging them to
take actions like registering to vote or watching a debate.
Users can mass text as many people as they'd like, using a pre-populated
but editable campaign message.
They're then encouraged to provide additional info on their contacts, like
preferred candidate, voting plan and interest in volunteering, further
building out the campaign's voter files.
The app doesn't ask for location data, but Woolley says all these names and
numbers can still go a long way in helping campaigns target voters.
When that data is triangulated with other streams of data, say from credit
reporting agencies or from data downloaded from social media firms, it
becomes way more powerful.
When it comes down to it, so many of the worries surrounding campaign apps
are the same ones that advocates and consumers alike have about data
privacy, hyper-targeted advertising and manipulation in the commercial
space. There is nothing that's free in the world, and you're either the
product or you're paying for the right to not be the product.
It's a chilling reminder of the way that tech giants and advertisers think
about our data. But the consequences could be even more concerning in the
political realm. People have gotten really used to this idea that we just
give away our data, whether it's we give away our data to Google Maps or
to Facebook. The thing that's particularly worrying about political
campaigns using applications to gather data is that they're using it for
politics. They're using it in attempts to kind of game the democratic
system. Right now, Democrats are more adept at using tech for relational
organizing. But Republicans definitely have the edge when it comes to
targeting voters using smartphone location data.
They've put Bluetooth beacons in lawn signs to track who passes by and set
up geofences around churches to identify mass-goers who aren't registered
to vote. Trump's former campaign manager, Brad Parscale, has spoken openly
about the vast amount of voter data gathered at Trump rallies.
While 2018 Senate candidate Beto O'Rourke also identified mobile ID numbers
at his rally, so far there are fewer reports of Democrats using this
tactic. But some say it's only a matter of time.
We're going to be in a 24/7, 365 world where all data and information,
including artificial intelligence, machine learning and endless computing
power, to know exactly who people really are.
Not who they say they are, but what they're really going to do, because
you have endless amounts to predict what they're going to do before they
do it. That's the world that we're going to get into.
But what if this isn't the world that we want?
We need really strict regulation upon both the commercial side and the
political side of data gathering.
Many say that could look something like the GDPR, Europe's data privacy and
security law, which sets strict regulations regarding transparency,
consent and user control over personal data.
The idea of having clear rules for consent and saying your data was
collected for this and it should be limited to this, or you have to be
notified if it's being used for something else, that could be adopted, y
ou can imagine, just for the political space.
Regular people don't have time on their hands to figure out how much data
is being gathered about them.
And so we've got to do something more about it.