If you work for the Department of Homeland Security, an app is going to be auto-loaded on your work phone, like that U2 album that auto-loaded on everyone’s iPhone in 2014, except instead of delivering “songs of innocence,” the app claims to deliver “unfiltered, real-time updates straight from the source” — the source is Donald Trump.
I’m sure you downloaded the app from the App Store or Google Play in March when it was released, but if you didn’t and, again, you work for DHS, you received an email on Tuesday that was seen by Politico, which reported the news. He calls the email app “a convenient way to access official White House communications, including announcements, executive actions, speeches, livestreams, videos and other updates.”
In the press release about the app on the White House site, the first item in the list of features is “breaking news alerts on major announcements, executive actions, and other key priorities.” With that in mind, you might think that the photo I chose for the title of this article – the one featuring a post that read “That Trump dance on Wednesday night🕺🇺🇸” – was chosen to poke fun at this, but that’s only the image the White House provided as an illustration.
Obviously other features are:
- video streaming
- A “library” that sounds like stored Trump sound bytes
- Ability to “stay connected” with new policies
- Option to send feedback including voice
According to Notus.org, some other features of the app include sharing user data with third parties, including time zone, IP address, and others. According to the notes, the White House app “does not disclose its data sharing the way most others do.”
Last month, the Trump administration asked federal agencies to start installing it on phones, and “at least one agency” — the FAA — was already set to get the app as an auto-download on their phones, according to the publication Government Executive.
A former IT executive at the government’s General Services Administration, named Soni Hashmi, told Government Executive that auto-install of apps is “a source of danger”, and “any app that is installed on government-issued devices can potentially create backdoor access to government networks behind firewalls.”
It is worth noting that the earlier White House app was released in 2010 when Barack Obama was the President. That app also doesn’t seem like it was all that great, but in Obama’s defense, 2010 was in the middle of the “there’s an app for that” bubble from the early days of smartphones.
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