Since the Trump campaign set up a shell company called American Made Media Consultants, in 2018, an entity it describes as a “vendor responsible for arranging and executing media buys and related services at fair market value,” it’s been nearly impossible to know whom the campaign is paying, for what, and how much. But, on May 27th, Alan Knitowski, the C.E.O. of Phunware, an Austin-based ad broker and software company, announced a “strategic relationship with American Made Media Consultants on the development, launch and ongoing management and evolution of the Trump-Pence 2020 Reelection Campaign’s mobile application portfolio.” Although Phunware never showed up in the campaign’s F.E.C. reports, Phunware’s S.E.C. filings show that, since last year, it has been paid around four million dollars by A.M.M.C.
On its face, Phunware seems like a strange choice to develop the campaign’s app. Before working for President Trump, Phunware’s software was being used in relatively few applications, the most popular being a horoscope app. And, since 2019, it has been embroiled in a lawsuit with Uber, a former client of the company’s ad-placement business. The dispute stems from a yearlong investigation by two former Phunware employees who discovered that the company was pretending to place Uber ads on Web sites like CNN when, in fact, they were appearing on pornography sites, among others, if they appeared at all. But, according to former Phunware employees and business associates, the company’s value to the Trump campaign is not in software development. “The Trump campaign is not paying Phunware four million dollars for an app,” a former business partner of the company told me. “They are paying for data. They are paying for targeted advertising services. Imagine if every time I open my phone I see a campaign message that Joe Biden’s America means we’re going to have war in the streets. That’s the service the Trump campaign and Brad Parscale”—the Trump campaign’s senior adviser for data and digital operations—“have bought from Phunware. An app is just part of the package.”
The Trump 2020 app is a massive data-collection tool in its own right. When it launched, on April 23rd, Parscale, who was then Trump’s campaign manager, urged his followers on Facebook to “download the groundbreaking Official Trump 2020 App—unlike other lame political apps you’ve seen.” Despite the hype, the 2020 app recapitulates many of the functions found on the 2016 app. There’s a news feed with Trump’s social-media posts, an events calendar, and recorded videos. The “gaming” features that distinguished the 2016 app are still prominent—a “Trump’s army” member who accumulates a hundred thousand points by sharing contacts or raising money is promised a photograph with the President, while other members can use points to get discounts on maga gear. Users are prompted to invite friends to download the app—more points!—and can use the app to sign up to make calls on behalf of the campaign, to be a poll watcher, to register voters, and to get tickets to virtual and in-person events.
The most obvious new feature on the 2020 app is a live news broadcast, carefully curated by the campaign to push the President’s talking points. It is hosted by a cast of campaign surrogates, including Lara Trump, Eric Trump’s wife, and Kimberly Guilfoyle, Donald Trump, Jr.,’s girlfriend and the campaign’s national finance chair. There are also channels aimed at particular demographic groups, among them Women for Trump, Black Voices for Trump, and Latinos for Trump. Though it is a crude approximation of a traditional news outlet, the Trump app enables users to stay fully sequestered within the fact-optional Trump universe. “I think everything we do is to counter the media,” Parscale told Reuters in June. “This is another tool in the tool shed to fight that fight, and it’s a big tool.” In May, after Twitter labelled one of Trump’s tweets as being in violation of its standards, sparking renewed claims of liberal-media censorship of conservatives (despite the fact that the tweet was not taken down), downloads of the campaign app soared.
To access the Trump app, users must share their cell-phone numbers with the campaign. “The most important, golden thing in politics is a cellphone number,” Parscale told Reuters. “When we receive cellphone numbers, it really allows us to identify them across the databases. Who are they, voting history, everything.” Michael Marinaccio, the chief operating officer of Data Trust, a private Republican data company, said recently that “what’s new this year, or at least a sense of urgency, is getting as many cell-phone numbers as we can in the voter file data.” An effective way to do that is to entice supporters to share not only their own cell-phone numbers with the campaign but those of their contacts as well. One estimate, by Eliran Sapir, the C.E.O. of Apptopia, a mobile-analytics company, is that 1.4 million app downloads could provide upward of a hundred million phone numbers. This will enable the Trump campaign to find and target people who have not consented to handing over their personal information. It’s not unlike how Cambridge Analytica was able to harvest the data of nearly ninety million unsuspecting Facebook users, only this time it is one’s friends, family, and acquaintances who are willfully handing over the data for a chance to get a twenty-five-dollar discount on a maga hat.
By contrast, the new Biden app still collects data on users, but it outlines the specific uses of that data and doesn’t automatically collect the e-mail and phone numbers of users’ friends and family. “Unlike the Biden app, which seeks to provide users with awareness and control of the specific uses of their data, the Trump app collects as much as it can using an opt-out system and makes no promises as to the specific uses of that data,” Samuel Woolley, the director of the propaganda research project at the University of Texas’s Center for Media Engagement, told me. “They just try to get people to turn over as much as possible.”
A Trump spokesperson told me, “The Trump 2020 app was built by Phunware as a one-stop destination with a variety of tools to get voters engaged with President Trump’s reëlection campaign.” Among its main contributions to the app’s data-mining capabilities is a “location experience kit,” which the company had previously marketed to hospitals and malls to help people navigate unfamiliar buildings. Visitors could pair their phone’s Bluetooth with beacons set up throughout the facility. Initially, the Trump 2020 app was built around big rallies, where this feature would have been useful. According to one former employee, however, the company’s location software, which functions even when the app is not open, may be capable of sucking up more than geographic coördinates. It could potentially “sniff out all of the information you have on your phone. Any sort of registration data, your name, your phone number, potentially your Social Security number, and other pieces of data. It could sniff out how many apps you have on your phone, what type of apps you have on your phone, what apps you deleted recently, how much time you’ve spent in an app, and your dwell time at various specific locations. It could give a very intimate picture of that individual and their relationship with that mobile device.” (Phunware did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)
In 2017, as Phunware was moving into the election space, the company’s Web site announced, “As soon as the first few campaigns recognize the value of mobile ad targeting for voter engagement, the floodgates will open. Which campaign will get there first and strike it rich?” A year later, according to people familiar with the effort, the company used its location-tracking capabilities to create a lobbying campaign on behalf of a health-care company aiming to influence legislators in Georgia. It put a “geofence” around the governor’s mansion that recorded the I.D. of every device that went in and out of the building, and then used the I.D.s to send targeted messages to those phones (likely including the governor’s) about the legislation it was aiming to influence. The legislation passed. Phunware’s leadership has also discussed their ability to geofence polling places, according to people who were present during these discussions, in order to send targeted campaign ads to voters as they step into the voting booth. While it is illegal to advertise in the vicinity of the polls, using location data in this way to send targeted ads could enable a campaign to breach that border surreptitiously.
Phunware’s data collection on behalf of the Trump campaign likely extends beyond the app as well. According to Phunware’s chief operating officer, Randall Crowder, the company has created a “data exchange” that “enables digital marketers to design custom audiences within minutes using geographic, interest, intent, and demographic segments . . . high-quality G.P.S. location data points from one hundred million-plus devices in the United States to increase scale of location-based audiences.” In its promotional materials, the company also claims to have unique device I.D.s for more than a billion mobile devices worldwide, and to have developed what it calls a Knowledge Graph—a “consumer-centric collection of actions, preferences, characteristics and predicted behavior” from the data it has siphoned from mobile phones and tablets. Much like Facebook’s social graph, which has been described as “the global mapping of everybody and how they’re related,” this enables the company to quickly sort through large data sets, uncovering connections and relations that otherwise would be obscured. For example: middle-aged women who live alone, rarely vote, own guns, and live in a border state.
So how did Phunware obtain a billion unique device I.D.s? As the company described it to the S.E.C., they were collected from phones and tablets that use Phunware’s software. But, according to people who have worked with the company, in addition to the data it obtains through its software, Phunware has been using its ad-placement business as a wholesale data-mining operation. When it bids to place an ad in an app like, for example, Pandora, it scoops up the I.D. of every phone and tablet that would have been exposed to the ad, even if it loses the bid. By collecting and storing this information, the company is able to compile a fairly comprehensive picture of every app downloaded on those devices, and any registration data a user has shared in order to use the app.
This information can yield rich demographic data. If a campaign is looking for young men with an affinity for guns, for instance, it might look at who has downloaded both Call of Duty and CCW, the Concealed Carry Fifty State app. Then, using the location data associated with the device I.D., the data can be unmasked and linked to an individual. Once a campaign knows who someone is, and where a person lives, it is not difficult to start building a voter file, and using this information to tailor ads and messages.
Tom Wheeler, the former chair of the Federal Communications Commission, told me, “These are Cambridge Analytica-like techniques. It’s collecting the descriptive power of data from multiple sources, most of which the consumer doesn’t even know are being collected. And that’s what Cambridge Analytica did.”
In late July, a group of lawmakers, led by Senator Bill Cassidy, Republican of Louisiana, and his Democratic colleague Ron Wyden, of Oregon, sent a letter to the chair of the Federal Trade Commission asking him to investigate whether using bidding information in this way constitutes an unfair and deceptive practice. “Few Americans realize that companies are siphoning off and sharing that ‘bidstream’ data to compile exhaustive dossiers about them,” they wrote, “which are then sold to hedge funds, political campaigns, and even to the government without court orders.” According to Charles Manning, the C.E.O. of Kochava, a data marketplace, “There are no regulatory bodies that appear to be aware of the technological foundations upon which digital advertising operates. This is a challenge, because without understanding how programmatic ads are bought and sold, regulators face an uphill battle in applying regulation that deals with opaque supply chains where fraudulent behavior can flourish.”
The Trump app, at least, is explicit about what it expects from its users: “You may be asked to provide certain information, including your name, username, password, e-mail, date of birth, gender, address, employment information, and other descriptive information,” the app’s privacy policy states. “The Services [of the app] may include features that rely on the use of information stored on, or made available through, your mobile Device. . . . We . . . reserve the right to store any information about the people you contact via the Services. . . . We reserve the right to use, share, exchange and/or disclose to DJTFP affiliated committee and third parties any of your information for any lawful purpose.” (When I asked Woolley why the campaign was asking supporters to share their contacts, since it already had access to them through the app’s permissions, he pointed out that, when a user shares their contacts to earn points, “that actually sends out messages to your contacts asking them to download the app. So rather than just getting data on your friends and family, they are able to also reach out to them using you as a reference.”)
The policy also notes that the campaign will be collecting information gleaned from G.P.S. and other location services, and that users will be tracked as they move around the Internet. Users also agree to give the campaign access to the phone’s Bluetooth connection, calendar, storage, and microphone, as well as permission to read the contents of their memory card, modify or delete the contents of the card, view the phone status and identity, view its Wi-Fi connections, and prevent the phone from going to sleep. These permissions give the Trump data operation access to the intimate details of users’ lives, the ability to listen in on those lives, and to follow users everywhere they go. It’s a colossal—and essentially free—data-mining enterprise. As Woolley and his colleague Jacob Gursky wrote in MIT Technology Review, the Trump 2020 app is “a voter surveillance tool of extraordinary power.”
I learned this firsthand after downloading the Trump 2020 app on a burner phone I bought in order to examine it, using an alias and a new e-mail address. Two days later, the President sent me a note, thanking me for joining his team. Lara Trump invited me (for a small donation) to become a Presidential adviser. Eric Trump called me one of his father’s “FIERCEST supporters from the beginning.” But the messages I began getting from the Trump campaign every couple of hours were sent not only to the name and address I’d used to access the app. They were also sent to the e-mail address and name associated with the credit card I’d used to buy the phone and its sim card, neither of which I had shared with the campaign. Despite my best efforts, they knew who I was and where to reach me.
Trump’s Digital Advantage Is Freaking Out Democratic Strategists
Left and right agree on one point. The president’s re-election campaign is way ahead online.
In a blog post published in November, a year before the 2020 election, Brian Burch, the president of CatholicVote.org, a socially conservative advocacy group, announced that in Wisconsin alone his organization had identified 199,241 Catholics “who’ve been to church at least 3 times in the last 90 days.”
Nearly half of these religiously observant parishioners, Burch wrote, “91,373 mass-attending Catholics — are not even registered to vote!” CatholicVote.org is looking for potential Trump voters within this large, untapped reservoir — Republican-leaning white Catholics who could bolster Trump’s numbers in a battleground state.
Burch, whose organization opposes abortion and gay marriage, made his plans clear:
We are already building the largest Catholic voter mobilization program ever. And no, that’s not an exaggeration. Our plan spans at least 7 states (and growing), and includes millions of Catholic voters.
How did Catholic Vote come up with these particular church attendance numbers for 199,241 Catholics? With geofencing, a technology that creates a virtual geographic boundary, enabling software to trigger a response when a cellphone enters or leaves a particular area — a church, for example, or a stadium, a school or an entire town.
Geofencing is just one of the new tools of digital campaigning, a largely unregulated field of political combat in which voters have little or no idea of how they are being manipulated, in which traditional disclosure requirements are inoperative and key actors are anonymous. It is a weapon of choice. Once an area is geofenced, commercial data companies can acquire the mobile phone ID numbers of those within the boundary.
This is how the National Catholic Reporter described the process in an article earlier this month:
Politically minded geofencers capture data from the cellphones of churchgoers, and then purchase ads targeting those devices. That data can be matched against other easily obtained databases, including voter profiles, which give marketers identifying information such as names, addresses and voter registration status. Such information can be a gold mine.
Burch described what CatholicVote.org initiated in the 2018 election. “We created ad campaigns targeted to mobile devices that have been inside of Catholic churches,” Burch explained. What’s more,
We told Catholics in Missouri the truth about then-Senator Claire McCaskill — that she was pro-abortion, was unwilling to protect the Little Sisters of the Poor, and opposed Catholic judicial nominees because of their religious beliefs. And she lost.
If you attend an evangelical or a Catholic Church, a women’s rights march or a political rally of any kind, especially in a seriously contested state, the odds are that your cellphone ID number, home address, partisan affiliation and the identifying information of the people around you will be provided by geofencing marketers to campaigns, lobbyists and other interest groups.
With increasing speed, digital technology is transforming politics, constantly providing novel ways to target specific individuals, to get the unregistered registered, to turn out marginal voters, to persuade the undecided and to suppress support for the opposition.
Democrats and Republicans agree that the Trump campaign is far ahead of the Democratic Party in the use of this technology, capitalizing on its substantial investment during the 2016 election and benefiting from an uninterrupted high-tech drive since then.
Republicans “have a big advantage this time,” Ben Nuckels, a Democratic media consultant said in a phone interview. “They not only have all the data from 2016 but they have been building this operation into a nonstop juggernaut.”
The new technology, Nuckels continued, allows campaigns to “deliver a broader narrative over the top” on television and other media, while “underneath in digital you are delivering ads that are tailored to those voters that you need to influence and persuade the most.”
The explosion of digital technology has created the opportunity for political operatives to run what amount to dark campaigns, conducted below the radar of both voter awareness and government oversight.
In some cases, the technology is very simple: the anonymous transmission of negative images of candidates by individuals to Facebook groups. This activity is neither reported to the Federal Election Commission nor linked to official campaigns.
Steven Livingston, a professor of media and public affairs and director of the Institute for Data, Democracy and Politics at George Washington University, has been tracking this sub rosa electioneering in the current election cycle. He found that supporters of two candidates, Trump and Bernie Sanders, are the primary practitioners.
The Washington Post and The New York Times have both reported on the activities of Sanders supporters, but, Livingston noted in an email, “Our evidence suggests that Trump supporters use automated promotion or cross posting four times as much as Sanders supporters.”
Livingston described “these digital shadow campaigns” as “analogous to and perhaps an actual digital manifestation of ‘dark money’ influence campaigns.” In addition, he continued,
Overwhelmingly, these pages and groups do not have ownership declarations or Facebook verifications. We simply do not know what other digital properties might be operated by common sources with the groups. There is money being spent but we don’t know the sources. It is unaccountable spending.
Livingston provided some of the kind of negative messages and images promoted by anonymous pro-Trump activists. Here is one:
And here is one made by a Sanders enthusiast:
Experts in the explosively growing field of political digital technologies have developed an innovative terminology to describe what they do — a lexicon that is virtually incomprehensible to ordinary voters. This language provides an inkling of the extraordinarily arcane universe politics has entered:
geofencing, mass personalization, dark patterns, identity resolution technologies, dynamic prospecting, geotargeting strategies, location analytics, geo-behavioural segment, political data cloud, automatic content recognition, dynamic creative optimization.
Geofencing and other emerging digital technologies derive from microtargeting marketing initiatives that use consumer and other demographic data to identify the interests of specific voters or very small groups of like-minded individuals to influence their thoughts or actions. Microtargeting first had a significant impact on American politics in state level campaign work by Alec Gage, a Republican, and his firm TargetPoint in 2002.
Now, political operatives are exploiting commercial techniques to correlate microtargeting data with the identification numbers of cellphones. This allows campaigns to mobilize, persuade and turn out — or to suppress turnout among — key voters.
In 2016, Trump spent far more than Hillary Clinton on digital campaigning, and since then his campaign, under the direction of Brad Parscale, has continued far outpace its Democratic rivals.
In a paper published this month, “The digital commercialization of US politics — 2020 and beyond,” Kathryn Montgomery, a professor of communications at American University, and Jeff Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, described the differences between the 2016 Trump and Clinton campaigns:
Whereas 31 percent of Donald Trump’s total campaign expenditures were for digital media, only 6 percent of Hillary Clinton’s expenditures were for digital. Moreover, whereas almost 50 percent of Mr. Trump’s media expenditures were for digital, only 8 percent of Secretary Clinton’s media expenditures were for digital. So although Secretary Clinton outspent Mr. Trump by $75 million on media, it is quite possible that Mr. Trump’s heavy reliance on digital media allowed for a more efficient and targeted ad campaign that escaped the eye.
Parscale, who is now managing Trump’s 2020 campaign, claimed in a 2018 tweet that the Trump campaign tech operation was “100 times to 200 times” more effective than the Clinton campaign’s, adding “@realDonaldTrump was a perfect candidate for Facebook.”
On Monday, Parscale boasted on the conservative website Townhall that Trump rallies are providing a gold mine of data for the 2020 election:
Out of more than 20,000 identified voters who came to a recent Trump rally in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, 57.9 percent did not have a history of voting for Republicans. Remarkably, 4,413 attendees didn’t even vote in the last election — a clear indication that President Trump is energizing Americans who were previously not engaged in politics.
Similar findings are coming out of other rallies, according to Parscale:
Nearly 22 percent of identified supporters at President Trump’s rally in Toledo, Ohio, were Democrats, and another 21 percent were independents. An astounding 15 percent of identified voters who saw the president speak in Battle Creek, Michigan, has not voted in any of the last four elections. In Hershey, Pennsylvania, just over 20 percent of identified voters at the rally were Democrats, and 18 percent were nonwhite.
In the current election cycle, Montgomery and Chester write,
further growth and expansion of the big data digital marketplace is reshaping electoral politics in the US, introducing both candidate and issue campaigns to a system of sophisticated software applications and data-targeting tools that are rooted in the goals, values, and strategies for influencing consumer behaviors.
Technologies used for “identity resolution,” they write,
enable marketers — and political groups — to target and ‘reach real people’ with greater precision than ever before. Marketers are helping perfect a system that leverages and integrates, increasingly in real-time, consumer profile data with online behaviors to capture more granular profiles of individuals, including where they go, and what they do.
The authors go on to warn that “all of these developments are taking place, moreover, within a regulatory structure that is weak and largely ineffectual.”
Tara McGowan, executive director of the recently created pro-Democratic group Acronym, which plans to spend $75 million on digital and other media, replied to my questions by email:
There’s no digital dark magic being deployed by Brad Parscale and the Trump campaign. They just have near unlimited resources and are spending them wisely to reach their voters where they are — online, and especially on platforms like Facebook.
The greatest advantage, McGowan continued, that
the Trump campaign has over Democrats heading into 2020 is time. Democrats may not settle on a general election nominee until late spring or summer. That gives the Trump campaign much more time to talk to voters and define the Democrats in places where it counts.
In addition to ACRONYM, pro-Democratic groups like
- Priorities USA,
- American Bridge,
- America Votes
and a host of others are working together, prepared to spend more than $300 million to counter the Trump efforts.
In addition, the campaigns of Mike Bloomberg, Bernie Sanders and Tom Steyer are all spending huge amounts of money on digital strategies focused on Facebook, Google and other social media.
Still, there are concerns that much of the Democratic spending will have limited value in the general election, insofar as it is going toward states that will not be 2020 battlegrounds, including, for example, Alabama, Arkansas, California, Massachusetts, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Utah and Vermont on Tuesday March 3, better known as Super Tuesday. In addition, whoever becomes the Democratic nominee will not be able to share his or her data with the independent pro-Democratic groups, according to federal regulation.
Apple, Google and most other major internet players have adopted privacy policies that would appear to significantly constrain the ability of data management firms to obtain detailed household information, consumer spending and partisan leanings of smartphone users. But it turns out that there are ways to get around the rules.
Serge Egelman, a research director at Berkeley’s International Computer Science Institute and a co-author of the paper “50 Ways to Leak Your Data: An Exploration of Apps’ Circumvention of the Android Permissions System,” replied to my email:
Most users are likely of the impression that apps will only collect the personal data that they’re asked about in the ‘permissions dialogues’ that they encounter (i.e., pop-up notifications asking if it’s O.K. for an app to access certain data, such as location, address book contacts, photos, etc.).
These unsuspecting users were mistaken.
We discovered that there are “back channels” through which the same data is available without having to present the user with a permission dialogue.
What does this mean for politics?
We know that many of these entities are data brokers and analytics companies that are in the business of using this type of data to profile mobile device users, and then selling these profiles to various entities, including political campaigns.
The data
generally provides information about individual users’ day-to-day activities and preferences:
- Where they shop;
- What they do for fun;
- What other apps they use, for how long, and
- what they do in those apps;
- Where they live;
- Where they work;
- With whom they associate.
This data, he added, enables campaigns to list “individual attendees at political rallies;” to identify “political leanings based on online and offline preferences (where you live, work, shop, play, etc.); and to segment “ads based on inferred psychographic traits (i.e., exactly what Cambridge Analytica did, but instead of personalized political ads on Facebook, users get personalized ads in potentially all of their mobile apps).”
Egelman noted that “from the user’s perspective, there’s literally no way of preventing it from happening or even knowing when it’s happening.” The expectation “that app users should be able to figure this all out and manage it is absolutely ludicrous.”
A pro-Democratic strategist who is helping coordinate the independent effort to defeat Trump — and who insisted on anonymity to protect his job — described what he believes is the current state of play in the role of digital technology in larger, overall strategy:
There’s no question that as a technical matter, the Republicans and the Kochs are spending much more and have better data than Democrats/progressives. But they also have a much more difficult product to sell: Trump.
If Marco Rubio were president in this thriving economy, he continued, “2020 would not be a competitive election, and the Democrats might not have claimed the House in 2018.”
“Crucially,” the strategist said,
Trump has two relevant advantages deriving from the asymmetry between the flow of Republican and Democratic information. First, when Trump says something, Fox repeats it. When a Democrat says something, The New York Times and the rest of the MSM knock it down if it’s false or debatable.
In other words, a huge swath of Trump-supportive media does not perform fact-based journalism.
In addition, the Democratic strategist said,
Trump benefits enormously because of the Right’s aligned network of media properties (i.e., Sinclair), Facebook properties, YouTube influencers and bots/sock puppets. This kind of amplification network barely exists for Democrats/progressives.
While studies show that “digital ads have at most a slight persuasive effect,” he noted,
the real goal of paid advertising is for the content to become organic social media. For example, a Trump ad saying that he’s brought back manufacturing jobs would persuade almost no one. But, when local news or your neighbor starts repeating that, it becomes more credible and persuasive. That’s what they’re after. To sum up, their content is advantaged because it reaches their target audiences, without friction, from the media that audience trusts, and is quickly and reliably repeated by other voices they trust in their world.
What’s the bottom line?
Finally, there’s the question of the size of the value of Trump’s data/digital advantage. Big enough to enable him to win the popular vote? Almost certainly not. Big enough to win Wisconsin? Frighteningly so.
