Democratic political consultants have some advice if you’d prefer not to have companies track your every move and sell that data to campaigns: avoid mobile games like Candy Crush.
“Political campaigns are a perfect microcosm of the data economy,” Raffi Krikorian, the host of the Technically Optimistic podcast tells Rolling Stone. “You have data brokers who are gonna sell you information, so I can create a model of who I should persuade and turn out and an election. How does that data flow? Where did the data brokers get all this information? It turns out, it’s like these crazy apps that you play video games on your phone on.”
Krikorian, a former Uber executive, is the chief technology officer at the Emerson Collective, a company founded by Laurene Powell Jobs that says it invests in purpose-driven entrepreneurs. The Democratic National Committee previously brought in Krikorian to rebuild and overhaul its security and tech infrastructure in the wake of the Russian email hacks and the party’s 2016 loss.
In the second season of Technically Optimistic, Krikorian says, “Our goal is basically to try to decipher tech for the everyday person. Because I know that a lot of people don’t understand the data economy they’re participating in, or the information economy they’re participating in.”
The third episode, released Wednesday, features political consultants who dish on how campaigns target supporters to win elections, what kind of information about people is available for purchase, and where the information comes from.
They review the Cambridge Analytica scandal — when Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign misused data from millions of Facebook users — and how Barack Obama’s 2012 campaign was able to use his supporters on Facebook to harvest data from all their friends.
A throughline in the episode is Candy Crush, and how mobile apps track and sell users’ location data.
Lindsey Schuh Cortes, CEO of the Democratic analytics firm TargetSmart, says in the episode: “My son, for instance, downloads all the apps on his phone. I’m like: ‘Don’t do that, they can track it, they can get more data.’ And he’s like, ‘Why do I care if they know I play Candy Crush?’ They know how long you play Candy Crush, they know all of those types of things. And then they’re gonna link it back to our house. For me, it’s why do you need access to my photos? Why do you need access to my location?”
Max Wood, who leads the progressive data and research company Indigo Engineering, tells Krikorian: “The creepiest piece of data that exists out on the market right now is location data, live location data. You have to be using an app on your phone that has permission to access your location data, and is always on and can then send it to a server. Things like — not trying to throw Candy Crush under the bus, I don’t know if Candy Crush grabs your location data, but apps of that genre that are ubiquitous, that’s why they exist. That’s their business model.”
According to a 2022 report in The Washington Post, Candy Crush Saga has been “grabbing kids’ general locations and other identifying information and sending it to companies that can track their interests, predict what they might want to buy, or even sell their information to others.”
“Bail bonds, companies that end up not getting the bail returned by the court, hire bounty hunters. And they’d get this Candy Crush location data, and they hunt down people. It’s truly wild,” Wood continues. “Corporations’ marketing departments will find these companies that aggregate and sell this data and say, ‘Hey, we want the names of everybody who was at Coachella, because we’re going to try to market to them about this lifestyle product that appeals to millennial, Bohemian hipsters or whatever.’ That’s very easy to get.”
Krikorian explains the upshot of this information — and how campaigns can use it: “A lot of consumer data is supposedly anonymized, meaning data that’s collected, for example, from your phone’s GPS is stored without personally identifying information, like your name, or home address. But location data that shows someone winding up at the same house every night often gives a clear indication of what this person’s home address might be. And if you compare that with the voter file, which does list a home address, then you form a powerful connection. Through this matching process, data scientists can wind up with shockingly detailed profiles on people.”
Later in the episode, he says: “Right now in the U.S., there is no protection in place against an iPhone game collecting GPS data and selling it. But lawmakers are spending their time instead on things like banning TikTok, despite the fact that we don’t have a national data privacy policy.”
Last month, President Joe Biden signed legislation that could ban TikTok in the U.S. unless its China-based owner, ByteDance, agrees to sell the popular social media platform. The public rationale has been that China could misuse Americans personal data or target them with misinformation — though some Republican lawmakers have admitted recently that the ubiquity of pro-Palestine content on TikTok was a motivator, too.
Krikorian tells Rolling Stone that “our data is out everywhere already,” and China “could just buy it if they want to.”
“That’s really the thing that regular people need to understand,” he says. “You’re shedding bits every single second of the day. Do you know where it’s going? You should ask questions about where it’s going. You should ask your representatives to give you power to understand that and have control over it like that.”
