Cruz app data collection helps campaign read minds of voters

Protecting the privacy of law-abiding citizens from the government is a pillar of Ted Cruz's Republican presidential candidacy, but his campaign is testing the limits of siphoning personal data from supporters. His "Cruz Crew" mobile app is designed to gather detailed information from its users' phones — tracking their physical movements and mining the names and contact information for friends who might want nothing to do with his campaign. That information and more is then fed into a vast database containing details about nearly every adult in the United States to build psychological profiles that target individual voters with uncanny accuracy.

Cruz's sophisticated analytics operation was heralded as key to his victory in Iowa — the first proof, his campaign said, that the system has the potential to power him to the nomination. After finishing a distant third in New Hampshire, Cruz is looking to boost the turnout of likely supporters in South Carolina and in Southern states with primaries on March 1, where voters are more evangelical and conservative. The son of mathematicians and data processing programmers, Sen Cruz (R-TX) is keenly and personally interested in the work.