Presidential Campaign Apps Get to Know You Really Well

How well does the next president of the United States know you? Depends on your apps.

By virtue of what you install on your computer or cellphone, your political preferences can become part of the soup of data that ad networks can mine — in this case on behalf of the presidential hopefuls, who are making their last push for reluctant or undecided voters. The Facebook apps of the Obama and Romney campaigns inhale a lot of information about you and your friends. Like many apps on Facebook, they gather your Facebook ‘likes’ and locations, along with your Facebook friends’ ‘likes’ and locations. Both can post content on your behalf; the Obama campaign app can even post what political contributions you have made. Brian Kennish, founder of Disconnect.me, which offers browser plug-ins to stave off the data collection, points out the weirdest feature. The Obama app “initiates an unencrypted client-side request to get your profile,” which means that if you’re using a public wireless connection, anyone with access to the network can see you’re using the app. As for the campaigns’ mobile apps, both have little pieces of code embedded in them to enable tracking. Both the Obama and Romney mobile apps send user data to a variety of companies, to serve ads and analyze user behavior, according to an analysis of both by PrivacyChoice, a firm based in Santa Cruz.