I was curious and installed it. But it wants my phone number to verify and I won’t give them that. Uninstalled

The “activist“ tools include, among other things, a text-spamming and calling feature, both of which employ the users’ actual phone number. In contrast, Democratic phone banks always anonymize phone calls to protect the privacy of volunteers. There’s also a feature that invites users to upload all their phone’s contacts into the app. Users’ friends will no doubt appreciate this giveaway of their lucrative personal information once they start getting spammed with texts and calls.

I declined to give Turning Point my phone book, skipped the spam texts, and instead hit “knock on doors.” Then I hopped in my car to try to find the “voters near me” listed in the app …

As I drove, a list of target contacts appeared, with the names, addresses, ages, and phone numbers of people up and down the road. Several entries were tagged with a red flag indicating that the address was home to multiple voters over the age of 75—a potential goldmine because older voters tend to vote more than younger ones.

Wow.

Really good article. These people have no idea how to make an app, apparently

Among the social media posts is a button that says, “Register To Vote: Tap Here.” Users are then led to the Turning Point Action website, where they’re instructed to fill out a form as if they were registering to vote. But there are clues that this is not an authentic voter registration form—“referred by,” and “referral email,” queries that have nothing to do with voting and a lot to do with data harvesting. Once the form is filled out, a new window opens announcing, “Wait! One more step! Confirm your state to register to vote online.” That’s when users click a state and are redirected to a government website where they can legitimately register to vote.

How dirty. That should be illegal.