Experts said the mobile app for Donald Trump's 2020 re-election campaign collects vast amounts of personal data and represents a risk to privacy.
The official "Trump 2020 app" spread through the Apple App Store and Google Play, and was criticized by cyber security researchers who raised concerns about the number of permissions the program requests after installing it on the user's device.
Election app or spy tool?
Once downloaded, the app seeks a mobile number for verification along with personal details including name, home address and zip code. It also asks the user to access contacts, approximate location, bluetooth communication, stored information, call information and more.
The disclaimer on the iOS app store prominently points to this issue, "This app may use your location even when it is not open, which may reduce battery life."
The Trump campaign collects all of this data that can then be used as part of an outreach or impact, by targeting anyone who registered with private messages about the campaign.
"Regardless of the political perspective, this application raises many privacy concerns," independent cyber security researcher Sean Wright told Newsweek.
"It appears in some respects that it is more like an espionage device in your pocket than an application to help make an informed decision for whom to vote for in the upcoming presidential election."
Once installed, the 2020 app can be used to share messages or news with supporters while collecting their data, all without relying on social networks, some of which are starting to stop the controversial Trump team advertising methods.
"Campaign applications - like this one - will play a big role in the next election cycle," said an analysis by members of the Advertising Research team at the University of Texas Media Center in Austin.
In accordance with Trump's privacy policy, it uses the information collected to send marketing messages, emails, or promotional messages for unspecified research purposes.
Joe Biden campaign app is less severe but not innocent
Trump's political opponent, Joe Biden, uses a similar app to target voters. The researchers said that the analysis of permission requests showed that it was much less than the Trump campaign application, although it also required user participation to access their contact lists.
"I don't understand why such an app needs so many permissions like the need to collect phone numbers or location data or control bluetooth functions," Wright told Newsweek.
"This casts some doubt on how this data is used. My advice is that it is best to avoid installing these applications, from a privacy perspective only."
Bluetooth access permission is usually used in the advertising industry where personalized ads target users with messages as they travel through a specific area, a controversial service by researchers at the Media Engagement Center.
Its inclusion in Trump's 2020 app permissions has also surprised Chris Boyd, chief intelligence analyst at MalwareBytes for cybersecurity.
Boyd told "Newsweek", "The use of Bluetooth technology in the advertising industry, especially in the form of marketing for specific regions, is probably the biggest concern."
"Depending on how the app is set to respond to Bluetooth, false signals can cause problems for both the Trump team and device owners," he added.
"The extensive permissions make it almost impossible for people to know what the phone, the app and the physical spaces around them do with their data. By comparison, the Biden app appears more focused on what people are expected to provide."
According to the results of the Media Engagement Center, Team Joe does not require access to Bluetooth, contact information, external storage, or phone ID data.
Boyd warned that asking too much information from users via the app might actually prove to be counterproductive to the Trump campaign, and said, "While the app requests a wide range of permissions, this does not always help in collecting data as it tries to deliver targeted messages."
Criticism of the application users
On the app market, there have been some scathing negative reviews of the Trump campaign app, as users complain of over-collecting data.
One of the users of the application wrote on the Android system, "I thought that this application would be a good place to get information, but all it does is show irrelevant ads, and it stays for a while on the same screen, and there is always something wrong", as for the operating system "iOS" One of them called it "the worst application in history."
Team Jo also accompanied a set of negative comments, with users angry at the lack of updates within the application and requesting access to contacts.
The official Trump app has received more than 100,000 downloads across the Google Play Store, and is said to have received about 780,000 downloads in total, according to the apptopia app.
Brad Pascal, director of Trump's re-election campaign for 2020, recently hinted at the importance of personal information when referring to ticket requests for the Tulsa race last weekend, describing it as "the largest data transfer ever".