In 2016, the Donald Trump campaign released an app called America First, which had about 120,000 registered users. Created by uCampaign, the app functioned both as a social network for Trump supporters and a tool for collecting data stored in a phone’s address book—such as the names, emails, and home addresses of both users and their saved contacts. For 2020, the Trump campaign again plans to offer an app to the president’s supporters, and it will likely collect some of their personal data. But this time, it appears the focus will be on tracking users’ locations.
Last week, the Intercept reported that a Texas company called Phunware had been hired by American Made Media Consultants, a firm set up to handle advertising services for PACs supporting Trump’s reelection effort, and that the deal was in conjunction with the Trump 2020 campaign. Phunware specializes in using phone location data to target messages to people. The company’s work for Trump’s 2020 effort caught people’s attention in part because its board of advisers includes Brittany Kaiser, a former employee of the disgraced political-data firm Cambridge Analytica and a self-styled whistleblower.
