The application of President Trump’s crusade is aimed at his highest ardent followers, but he is able to gather knowledge about a much larger part of the American public than his base.

The app requires access to a load of additional data on a user’s phone than Joe Biden’s and 1.four million devices, directly compared to 6four, 000 for Biden, according to figures provided to CBS News through Apptopia.

And the knowledge gathered from the Trump app was poured into a knowledge formula designed to reposition Facebook’s features, since its deactivation, which made possible the 2016 Cambridge Analytica scandal, according to a former apple executive who developed the app.

Download the official Trump 2020 app or the “Team Joe app,” and you’ll be asked to temporarily produce campaigns with access for your contacts. You must click “OK”, but if you do, campaigns know the names and numbers of everyone you stored the facts from. At no time do campaigns ask for the collaboration of these contacts to have this information, nor are best friends required to do so.

A person’s touch list is a valuable knowledge set, said Eliran Sapir, CEO of Apptopia.

“A specific authorization is that, perhaps, the largest gold mine is the phone directory. It’s social media on his phone,” Sapir said.

Since Apple’s giants have many taps on their phones, Sapir said the facts of Trump’s “orders of magnitude” campaign’s touch list are more critical than Biden’s.

“With 1. four million downloads, this would generate tens of millions or more than 100 million phone numbers,” Sapir said.

A list of those names and phone numbers is favorable when cross-reference is made with knowledge collected from other sources, said Jacob Gursky, a researcher at the University of Texas at Austin, who analyzed the programs with fellow researcher Samuel Woolley. The couple called the Trump app “a device to track the electorate of ordinary power” in the MIT Technology Review.

“By connecting for their non-public relations, he blurs the line between his non-public life and politics and creates more effective messages than they can do on his own,” Gursky said.

Trump’s Crusade answers QUESTIONS from CBS News about the app, its knowledge permissions and its developer.

An official of Biden’s crusade showed CBS News in an email that the crusade is using touch lists to whom to address.

“Users are invited to download their touch lists to advance maximum productive touches to send a message about Biden’s crusade,” the official said. “Contact details are never used much for other purposes and will be securely deleted once the cross is complete. Users can also refuse to assign a percentage of their taps, and the app works more like a cross-check-in news feed.”

The official said no other non-public knowledge was collected because Biden’s crusade was implemented.

Trump’s crusade doesn’t just require access for your friends’ contacts. The app requires direct permission to access a more complete data load than Biden’s, which includes:

The unique device identifier of a phone, which Sapir called “valuable data”, favored to target classified ads to explicit people.

Bluetooth and “approximate” and “accurate” location data, which collects very detailed data about a person’s movements.

Find applicable accounts with other programs on your device, which Sapir says is favorable for “fingerprinting,” a targeted virtual advertising technique that comes to a wide variety of knowledge about Americans for profiling.

Change audio settings, an applicable authorization with video and music apps.

Trump’s crusade did not answer questions about authorizations. The manager of Biden’s crusade criticized the trump app’s licensing list and noted that Biden’s app became “a great intergender friend so we can mock the security of the facts and the privacy of our followers.”

The Trump app evolved through a combined apple called Phunware, which has a wealth of knowledge to paint. Phunware says on its website that it has the strength to gather knowledge of one billion active cellular devices according to the month. The Crusade and Phunware did not answer questions about the adjustment between crusade knowledge and Phunware knowledge.

A former Phunware executive, Ian Karnell, told CBS News that the company’s speech to political consumers will relocate the facts Facebok had removed, the so-called “API Graph” that allowed Cambridge Analytica to gather a wealth of data about millions of other Americans and their relationships.

“We said, “We have this cellular chart comprising years of device identity data that we have received compared to voter knowledge with some of the largest voter registration knowledge bases in the United States at this time. And we’re able to make a percentage of that. The graphic best friend is the facts with you. You can extract that and make the most of it, ” said Karnell.

Karnell said the implementation of Trump’s crusade includes a “flagrant” set of authorization applications. “They prefer access to everything. The ability to add other things of knowledge that is also collected from a cellular device from a geolocation point of view: where you live, where you work, where you shop,” Karnell said. Karnell was not concerned about the design of the Trump Crusade application. He announced an internal investigation in 2016 that allegedly revealed the “most” fare to Uber, a former Phunware customer, which was based on fraudulent knowledge. The investigation was cited through Uber in an ongoing legal dispute between the 2 companies.

Karnell “Employee B” in documents filed through Uber, but agreed to be known through CBS News.

Phunware denied all Uber’s accusations and, in a case last October, Phunware CEO Alan Knitowski denied Karnell’s description of alleged fraudulent practices, calling it “completely wrong.” Karnell was fired through Phunware in 2018 for what Phunware called “poor performance”.

Knitowski referred questions about the application to the Trump campaign. When asked if his former employee’s description of Phunware’s political operation was accurate, Knitowski said in an email, “No one is legal to talk about being the apple component about something big yet.”

“Please, it does not seem allowed or allowed to publish anything about Phunware that does not come from the company … especially the friend of other Americans who doesn’t even paint here,” Knitowski wrote.

Karnell said one of Phunware’s top offerings for businesses and political consumers is knowledge of proximity beacons, constant devices that use Bluetooth signals to collect data about phones passing by.

Karnell said that before running for the Trump campaign, Phunware used device data at demonstrations and marches.

“We were looking to spot audiences of other Americans who would demonstrate at women’s marches, and we did so longitudinally. I looked to know, do we see new cellular devices?” Karnell says.

Karnell said the labels are very critical in identifying the electorate who might have criticized Trump for the past four years, and noted that other Americans who attended demonstrations in 2016 could not have participated this year yet.

When Trump’s crusade debuted on his website on May 10, 2017, his privacy policy first included the language that touched proximity tags. The connection to proximity tags was removed that day after CBS News interviewed him. In July 2019, some time after Phunware started running for the crusade, he added the language.

“We collect additional data based on your location and your device’s proximity to ‘beacons’ and other similar proximity systems, including, for example, the signal strength between the beacon and your device and how long it is close to the beacon.” Policy readings.

Jennifer Stromer-Galley, editor of the bok “Presidential Campaigns in the Internet Age,” said Trump’s app is amazing for Biden’s “content and functionality,” in addition to the knowledge gathered about you and your behavior.

“I would say that the Biden app is a failure. It has no local features or content. It doesn’t provide a big block of machine bureaucracy you’d expect from a cellular app (from the presidential campaign),” Stromer said. Galley, director of Cinput at Syracuse University for Computational and Data Science.

Biden’s crusade responds to Stromer-Galley’s criticisms.

Trump’s 2016 app was created by a company called uCampaign. The Android coding framework for Phunware’s 2020 version still includes several references to uCampaign. And the Android store download page for the 2020 Trump app continued this year to link to uCampaign’s privacy policy, not the Trump campaign’s, until June 25, when CBS News inquired about it.

UCampaign CEO Thomas Peters said in an email that his apple was not concerned about the production of the 2020 app, but that the 2020 crusade had used its 2016 “package ID” to make his auto friend make the hot app as a large update. Appleuser that downloaded the previous one.

In practical terms, this has given Trump’s crusade a gigantic advantage. The $1.4 million Trump application station dates back to August 2016, according to Apptopia data. By comparison, the Biden app has only been downloaded 6 times, 000 times since it was announced in December.

Karnell said knowledge that is also compiled from this giant base of app users can give Trump’s crusade an imperative merit to identify unconvincing voters.

“If I’m (the campaign), I want to dominate the people I can influence. Who is never necessarily convinced to vote for Trump again, so this is a lands-taking by as much knowledge as possible. They are limited.” time in what they can also do only on Facebook, so they do it that way,” Karnell said.

A quest to understand this “land grabbing” more or less led New School professor David Carroll to Britain’s High Court of Justice. Carroll’s July 2017 lawsuit in opposition to London-founded Cambridge Analytica was in the middle of the Netflix documentary “The Great Hack”.

Carroll said the sessions of his efforts to gain his 5,000 things of knowledge that Cambridge Analytica claims to have stored in millions of Americans is that the set of political knowledge is “a wild west.”

“There are no rules, everything is allowed, and we simply cannot have a formula that allows us to do anything. I think what the Cambridge Analytica scandal has shown us more unconditionally friendly is that there are some upheavals that other Americans care about their privacy and their policy is a component of it,” Carroll said.