The New Yorker Didn’t Let the Truth Get in the Way of a Good Story

a teardown of fake news

The New Yorker recently published an article by Sue Halpern with the clickbait-worthy title, How the Trump Campaign’s Mobile App is Collecting Huge Amounts of Voter Data. Any PR firm will tell you to turn the other cheek and not make a big deal about factual misrepresentations or outlandish claims in the media, but in this case the errors are so egregious that for the sake of the many incredible men and women who have committed their time, energy, money and reputation to Phunware for more than a decade, Phunware has prepared this detailed correction. What follows is The New Yorker article in question with brackets placed throughout to provide a fact check that should have been done long before this piece was ever published.

Since the Trump campaign set up a shell company called American Made Media Consultants, [A shell company is commonly defined as “an inactive company used as a vehicle for various financial maneuvers or kept dormant for future use in some other capacity.” American Made Media Consultants (AMMC) is an active customer of Phunware and is the operating company that employs very capable men and women who interact with the Phunware team daily.] 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, [Phunware is an enterprise software company, not an “ad broker”.] 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. [Who better to develop the campaign’s mobile application than a company that has more than a decade of history and experience building the highest profile mobile applications in the world across virtually every industry vertical? Phunware has had, and continues to have, customers on both sides of the political aisle. Phunware was selected in a competitive bidding process, based on corporate merit and capability, including our unique ability on mobile to securely support more than four billion transactions per day and as many as 500,000 transactions per second worldwide. ] Before working for President Trump, Phunware’s software was being used in relatively few applications, the most popular being a horoscope app. [This is an egregious misrepresentation. Phunware’s Multiscreen-as-a-Service (MaaS) software and platform have been used globally at scale for more than a decade in hundreds of Fortune 1000 enterprise applications across industries including Sports, Media & Entertainment, Retail, Hospitality, Healthcare, Technology, Aviation, Education and Government.] 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. [This is inaccurate. As disclosed in our public filings, the dispute stems from a suit filed by Phunware against Uber in 2017 for non-payment. No one at Phunware conducted an “investigation” and while the company cannot comment on the details of ongoing litigation, suffice it to say that this summary is grossly misleading.] 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.” [This is incorrect. Phunware designed, built and supports the campaign’s iOS and Android mobile application portfolios. In other words, Phunware provides software, infrastructure and services specific to the mobile applications. Phunware is not, nor has it ever been contracted by AMMC or any of its affiliates for its media and data software or services.]

The Trump 2020 app is an enormous data-collection tool in its own right. [Users are in charge of the experience that is provided within the Official Trump 2020 mobile application and must provide consent for certain capabilities and interactions to be allowed. These applications comply with the privacy policies of AMMC and Phunware, overlaid with what Apple and Google demand from any mobile application on their respective platforms.] 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 name Phunware is a play on the word “funware” and represents “applications that exhibit game-like mechanics and behavior.” In fact, Phunware not only patented and created the world’s first “companion television experience” on mobile for Discovery’s MythBusters television show, but it also collaborated with WWE on the design, creation and launch of the WWE Network — the world’s first Over The Top (OTT) Direct To Consumer (DTC) mobile application portfolio. Phunware was selected over Salesforce in a competitive bidding process to win the AMMC contract, in part because of Phunware’s ability to securely support more than four billion transactions per day and 300,000 to 500,000 transactions per second worldwide.]

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. [This mobile application portfolio, like all others developed by Phunware, is biased to the customer since Phunware’s customers are responsible for content. With more than two million downloads and counting, one could make a strong argument that Phunware has done an exceptional job on the Official Trump 2020 mobile application portfolio, just as it has with other applications across numerous vertical and industry categories.]

To access the Trump app, users must share their cell-phone numbers with the campaign. [True, but if users do not want to provide this information, then they don’t have to.] “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. [This implies connections and comparisons that simply do not exist. Users make their own choices and determinations as to what kind of mobile experience they want and what information they want to trade or exchange in return for discounts or other personal or financial benefits. This is no different than going to a grocery store and voluntarily opting into a “rewards program” whereby you provide your phone number and contact information in exchange for having your purchasing tracked and then being eligible for special offers or discounts.]

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.” [One wonders why the author has missed the more important privacy aspects of what the Biden mobile application portfolio does so poorly versus what the Official Trump 2020 mobile application portfolio does so well. Namely, the Biden campaign has turned over plenty of data on people using their mobile applications recently — unintentionally. Their mobile applications, security and technologies seem to be so poorly conceived and implemented that hackers were able to expose more than 190 million voter records.]

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. [This is misleading speculation at best. Phunware applications work in the foreground or the background based on user specifications. This is not specific to Phunware. Mobile application users are not only in charge of what they want when they want it, but are also subject to platform guidelines that actually prompt users proactively to let them know when any mobile application is running in the background when not in use, giving them the option to shut down that capability if they want to do so.] 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. [Phunware has not now nor has it ever collected Social Security numbers in this manner and the author’s insinuation to the contrary is a gross misrepresentation.] 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.” [There’s nothing in these statements that is factually accurate, technologically possible through the Official Trump 2020 mobile application portfolio developed by Phunware or even legally permissible.] (Phunware did not respond to multiple requests for comment.) [It’s not Phunware’s place to comment on its customers and its leadership has regularly directed the media to discuss specific mobile application portfolios with each respective customer. However, Phunware does have an expectation that the media will take advantage of public filings and marketing collateral online to understand the business of the company being reported on.]

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?” [Here is a link to the Phunware web site URL where the author sourced this phrase. It was cut and pasted without any of the context associated with the lengthy educational blog that was provided for Phunware’s customers on both sides of the political aisle.] 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 software, including its Location Based Services, is accurate and insightful, as it allows customers to engage in real-time interactions based on any number of factors. This is what customers both need and want. However, this is no different than similar offerings provided by Google, Facebook, Apple and just about any other large technology company with an engagement strategy. Suggesting that Phunware’s capability deliberately facilitates illegal activity is like blaming the manufacturer of a hammer when it is used as a weapon.]

Phunware’s data collection on behalf of the Trump campaign likely extends beyond the app as well. [The author is drawing unsubstantiated conclusions. Phunware has never contracted with AMMC to provide any of its media or data capabilities. Phunware provides an enterprise cloud platform for mobile that offers its customers a better way to engage with content that is ultimately up to the customer to provide and deploy. However, to be clear, Phunware would certainly support these initiatives with any customer inside or outside of politics if contracted for these specific services.] 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.” [This is accurate, but these are capabilities of Phunware’s media and data offerings and Phunware has never been contracted by AMMC or any affiliate to provide them. However, every political party or candidate should absolutely contact Phunware if they need a comprehensive strategy to locate, connect with and engage their constituents.] 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. [This is all true, but is not in any way applicable to the contracted work that Phunware has engaged in with AMMC.]

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. [Since its inception, Phunware has sought to create a Phunware ID for every device that has touched its platform. Whether through GPS, WiFi, beacons, servers, applications, websites or software, anywhere Phunware is permitted by users to add them to its database and connect client and server dots together, Phunware will seek to do so. Some information is anonymized, but some is not. Some devices have ID For Advertising (IDFA), while others have a media access control (MAC) address or both. However, Phunware often doesn’t see any such data because that’s what a user has specified. Think of this like getting free WiFi at Starbucks in return for agreeing to the terms of use when you connect. The Internet access is provided for free, but in return, Starbucks knows more about you because you provided your email or device ID. None of this applies to the Official Trump 2020 mobile application portfolio, but the generalities are accurate even if the speculations in this article are not.]

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. [This is possible, but not in the case of the Official Trump 2020 mobile application portfolio developed by Phunware. Separately and for the record, TargetSmart and others have most voter files whether they are publicly available or not. As highlighted previously above, 190 million of those files were hacked inside the Biden mobile application portfolio.]

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.” [This is accurate, but is not applicable to the Official Trump 2020 mobile application portfolio developed by Phunware.]

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.” [Again, all of this makes for great storytelling, but it doesn’t make Phunware the second coming of Cambridge Analytica. Phunware has no contract with AMMC or anyone else to do any of this on behalf of POTUS, but Phunware would gladly consider providing these features to any political candidate or party who wanted to leverage the power of data to drive their engagement strategy on mobile. It’s also important to note that Phunware always adheres to prevailing laws and regulations on data collection and privacy, including Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA). Click here to learn more about Phunware’s privacy policy.]

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 Trump app is explicit about what it expects from its users”. Absolutely! No one in this case is doing anything within their mobile applications without explicit user consent, as it should be and as it always is with mobile applications developed by Phunware on MaaS.]

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.” [The real point here remains explicit user consent.]

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. [This is how “Big Data” works and it’s how Facebook, Google, WalMart, Apple, Target, Amazon, P&G, Ford, Wynn and nearly every other company doing this operates. The privacy issue needs to be taken up with the credit card company and/or the other places where important information may have been disclosed.]

FAKE NEWS UPDATE: Sadly, these types of false narratives get picked up by other media outlets. Jason Koebler and Joseph Cox seem to have ripped off her inaccuracies and misstatements from anonymous and unnamed “sources” for their parallel Vice articled entitled, It’s Impossible for you to Know Which Apps Sell Your Location Data to Trump.

Nevertheless, Phunware commends all of the journalists who still take the time to verify the efficacy of their claims, especially when the basis of an article is easily discoverable data and media engagements tied to customer contracts that exist or in this case, do not.

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