Pro Trump Group Targets Catholic Voters Using Cell Phone Technology
From the National Catholic Reporter:
Political marketers are using cellphone data from churchgoers to target the GOP base, especially white Catholic and evangelicals in key states for the 2020 presidential election.
Geofencers capture data from the cellphones of churchgoers, and then purchase ads targeting those devices.
That data can be matched against other easily obtained databases, including voter profiles, which give marketers identifying information such as names, addresses and voter registration status.
At least one lobbying organization, CatholicVote.org, has boasted about the possibilities of using geofencing to help tip the presidential election in favor of President Donald J. Trump.
My experience has been that Catholics really want to keep politics out of the parish. Once I attended Mass then a dinner at a large Catholic parish. Right to life groups plastered cars with their literature. Many of the people at the dinner were very upset that their parish had been violated.
The little know organization Catholic Democrats tried to do something about it at some locations around the country and were moderately successful. They confronted the literature people. Told them they were ready to call the police if they did not leave, thereby forcing the pastors to disavow those that distributed the leaflets less the parish's IRS status be challenged. Of course there are not enough of a Catholic Democrat's organization to confront the issue.
Now since Republican are using cell phone data, everyone has to face the issue that the parish is no longer politically neutral; it will become in the coming election a political battleground. How can pastoral staff keep political neutrality while acknowledging that politics is going on? How can liberal groups counter the Republican offense? My suggestion is find all the Catholics that show up only on Christmas and Easter; target them. Especially the ones who are not registered to vote.
The NYTimes has an excellent series on the deeply disturbing aspects of this cell phone technology. They were given anonymously a large database. The tracked things like Trump secret service agents, and other members of security forces. Even these people had little defense against the technology.
The first sentence from Heidi Schlumpf's NCR article:
ReplyDelete"The next time you go to church, you might want to turn off your phone."
As a matter of fact, in our pre-Mass announcements, we ask our assembly to do exactly that!
Being targeted by Republicans doesn't mean that Catholics will vote Republican. Polling shows pretty consistently that Catholics are not monolithic in their politics. Last election, we Catholics were pretty evenly divided between Trump and Hillary. It's possible that, if the Democrats run a better candidate this time, Democrats could do significantly better than 50% of the Catholic vote.
Fwiw, I don't think this initiative will bring politics into the parish. Rather, conservatives will use this technology (geofencing) to observe behavioral patterns (which happens to involve going to church frequently) and then cross-reference that data with other data sets to identify those, er, behavers, and then target them in ways that don't involve going into the parish. For example, if they want to get an unregistered church attendee to vote, they could send a campaign worker to the attendee's home to ring his/her doorbell.
Jim, Catholic voters were not really "evenly" divided in the last election. The white Catholics went for Trump by a fair margin. The minority Catholics (Latino) went for Hillary.
DeleteMr. Trump fared well among white Catholics, who backed him nationwide 56 percent to 37 percent, according to the A.N.E.S. data. The reverse was true among Hispanic Catholics, the fastest growing demographic in the U.S. church, who backed Mrs. Clinton 74 percent to 19 percent.
https://www.americamagazine.org/politics-society/2017/04/06/new-data-suggest-clinton-not-trump-won-catholic-vote
What the geofencers will try to do with their data is identify white Catholics to register them or to target in "get out the vote" campaigns.
Your parish just might be a handy target based on what you have said about the demographics. Tell your (mostly white) parishoners to take the batteries out before leaving for church if they don't want the politicians to try to manipulate them.
I suspect that if we informed parish members of what is going on, any attempts to send messages would probably backfire with anyone who was not already committed to Trump.
DeleteI think people just would not like the idea that church data was being used to lobby people selectively.
In the last local election I was very curious as to why one of my lesser used e-mail accounts was getting messages from a candidate from our parish; it is the account the parish has listed for me.
Sure enough when the new parish directory came out it had our e-mails in it. This guy had them in advance. I was not very happy since that meant someone in the parish was not neutral.
I saw the same article - very disturbing. I use few apps, and live a boring life. I don't shop often except for groceries. I don't pay attention to ads, never click on them (usually never even see them, just skip past) and I don't give my cellphone # out to stores where I do shop. I don't give my landline # out either.
ReplyDeleteI have set my phone to not provide location data except when using specific apps - so pretty much only when I use Google Maps. I have that set to use location data only when using the app, and not when it's closed. So I never get ads or notifications on my cell phone. If I'm on the road and looking for a restaurant or whatever, I search for them myself using google. That could provide ads, but never on my phone. I use my ipad for that. I have found that being registered as Not Affiliated with any political party has caused both political phone calls and printed political literature to almost disappear from my life completely. Including requests for money.
I also learned from reading a tiny notice at the store where I do most of my shopping that my movements within the store are tracked - to see what departments I visit and how long I stay there. The notice told me that I can opt out of this tracking by visiting their website.
I use an iPad a lot, and have done the same with the few apps I use on that. When only using an app occasionally, such as Uber, I delete if from my devices until the next time I need it. Generally when traveling. So I download Uber, I download the airline app so I can quickly check status, etc. Once the trip is over I delete them. I have maxed as much as possible the privacy settings on Facebook - but you have to keep up to date, as they change things and suddenly your information becomes more public again. I have a couple of email addresses that I use for commercial purposes - given to a couple of stores where I do shop so that I get the sale notices by email. I don't use those email addresses for personal purposes. Occasionally a real estate site demands contact info in order to look at their listings (not the big ones - Zillow, Redfin etc, but individual brokerages who sometimes have better specific search parameters - we are looking around at different possibilities now). I provide a throwaway email address and use a phone number that is area code-555-####. Using the 555 means that I don't accidently use somebody's real phone #, subjecting them to spam calls.
Also, turning off your phone doesn't protect it from being tracked. In order to do that, you have to remove the battery after turning it off. Visiting/working in secure facilities in DC means a choice of leaving your phone with the guard at the door, or leaving the battery to your phone with the guard at the door! Either way, you might not remember to pick it up on your way out and have to go back for it. This is to protect the security of the classified facility, not to protect the individual from ads. Spies (real ones)can sit outside the buildings and pick up signals, including conversations in rooms where people have cellphones that have batteries in them, even if the phones are turned off. The most sensitive work is done in SCIFs, built to very secure standards in order not to leak information via walls, windows, computers, phones etc - so that computer signals are not picked up either.
I have saved the New York Times series (and a similar one on the WaPo site) in order to slowly and methodically figure out what I need to do now. It's stunning to know that "they" know more about our lives than most of our closest friends and family!
If things get too bad, I will ditch the plan, pay cash for the next phone, and use a pay-as-you go plan instead of a regular cell phone plan. Then the phone # is not linked to the owner of the burn phone personally. Anyone who watches police procedural shows knows this! ;)
I also shop very little online. However ... I carry my cell phone everywhere, and I use credit cards quite a bit for typical transactions. I use Google applications pretty extensively, especially for email, calendaring and search. I have several Facebook accounts but don't use any of them, so I am not sure what value the data collectors would find from my Facebook membership. I don't use Twitter or other social media products. But even if we bracket out social media, I assume there is enough information out there about my behavior that the marketers, political operatives et al are able to reach fairly reasonable conclusions about my behaviors, likes and dislikes.
DeleteI am generally conservative, especially compared to the "typical" NewGathering contributor, but I try not to stay in the conservative media bubble. I subscribe to virtual and real publications that cover a fairly broad range on the ideological spectrum. So I may be sending "mixed signals" to the people trying to suss out what I'm thinking. Or - maybe I'm not as complicated as I'd like to think, and "they", whoever "they" are, have a pretty clear idea what I'm going to have for dinner tonight and who I'm going to vote for in 2020.
"Geofencing", that's a new one for me. The kind of thing Jack references in his post makes me angry. It's pretty common when election time draws near that various "Catholic" groups put stuff under the windshield wipers of cars in the church parking lot. If I see it, it goes in the dumpster on the way out. It's not the clergy doing this, it's lay people. Neither our priest nor our archbishop get very political except to outline some general moral principles. But on the other hand they don't tell the ones doing it not to. I think that would backfire and get ugly if they did.
ReplyDeleteI always leave my cell phone home when I go to church. I figure people can leave a message if they want to talk to me. We keep our landline because that's how some family members contact us. But most of the calls we get there are junk. I never pick up unless I recognize the caller ID.
A lot of political stuff comes in on email. I try to block it.
Even though I am still a "non-practicing, fallen-away Republican", I am on a Catholic Democrats of Nebraska Facebook page. They get into some back-and-forth with people that write for the archdiocesan paper. They seem to think Catholic Democrats are next door to heretics, even though 40% of Nebraskans did vote against Trump in the last election.
Call me Luddite. I only take my cell phone with me when it is likely to be needed. It sits on dresser most of the time slowly draining the battery and functioning as a backup alarm clock. Even so, if I go anywhere with it, it asks me how my "experience" was. I don't reply. But I know it is trying to use me. Nor do I believe anything that is Yelped.
ReplyDeleteBut in my ignorance, I wonder what, besides big bills and AI doubletalk, the Rs are going to get. I mean, anciently available demographics tell you all you need to know. In Milwaukee County, Rs are at St Robert's and Ds at St. Boniface and St. Benedict. In Palm Beach County, Rs are at Joan of Arc and Ds are at Our Lady Queen of Peace, where ICE lies in wait. If ICE knows, surely so does the Republican County Committee. Zeroing in more precisely than that probably wouldn't be cost-effective. Or am I missing something?
Because of my wife's involvement in right-to-life issues, we get a lot of R and R-related mail and robocalls. Because of my magazine subscriptions, we get a lot of D and D-related mail and email, and biennial calls from Bill Clinton. I don't know how finding out when we go to church could tell the senders any more than they think they know.