Joe Biden’s campaign app has exposed personal information for as many as 191 million people. App Analyst, a mobile computing expert that reviews and investigates apps, and they found that by making a fake contact list, they can fool the app into given up people’s personal information.
When you turn over your contact list, App Analyst matches up the name to their data bank of 191 million people and they send their information to you. This is a gold mine for phishing scams. It will also anger many people who find out their information is being sold all over the internet.
The campaign app, Vote Joe, allows Biden supporters to encourage friends and family to urge them to vote in November. I’m betting that many people will be very angry when they find out.
The App Analyst found that they could trick the app into collecting anyone’s information by creating a contact on his phone with the voter’s name. The analyst told TechCrunch that the app also pulls in a lot more data than it displays. By intercepting the data that is sent between the device and the app’s servers, the analyst saw more detailed and private information of voters including their home address, date of birth, gender, ethnicity, and political party affiliation.
The Biden campaign has reportedly issued an update to fix the bug. Matt Hill, a spokesperson for the Biden campaign, told TechCrunch: “We were made aware about how our third-party app developer was providing additional fields of information from commercially available data that was not needed. We worked with our vendor quickly to fix the issue and remove the information. We are committed to protecting the privacy of our staff, volunteers and supporters will always work with our vendors to do so.”
Target Smart says that the information available was very little. Just your name, address and phone number, right?