- The Trump administration has an official White House app
- It is a mandatory installation on most government-issued phones.
- Federal workers find they can’t remove it
Let’s move on to the White House, where many government employees are not very happy about having the current administration’s official app installed on their phones. There is a lot of pro-Trump content here and there seems to be no way to get rid of the app.
As Wired reports, numerous federal workers are unhappy about having the app foisted on them: One said it presents “pure, unadulterated propaganda” from the Trump administration, while another said “I deleted it as evidence and it came back immediately.”
The app that now appears to be mandatory on government-issued devices is apparently the same one that anyone can download for their Android or iOS devices. Includes breaking news, social media feeds, photo galleries, and several streams of presidential speeches and press conferences.
There is also reportedly a button on the app to “text President Trump,” which then auto-populates a speech bubble that reads “Greatest President Ever” — one of the touches on the app that nonpartisan officials object to.
Security and privacy concerns
Federal workers can’t remove the White House app from their phones from r/technology
It seems like all the news and content on the app takes a pro-Republican, anti-Democratic stance, which is fine for political campaigns, but less suitable for federal agency workers who remain on the job as administrations come and go.
According to Wired, some officials simply refuse to interact with the app or even use their government phones much. Some agencies appear to have been able to prevent the app from being a mandatory installation; the General Services Administration is one that Wired mentions, for example.
It seems that the app’s privacy policies are also quite insubstantial, while in May a security researcher found numerous issues related to data security and privacy in the app; again, not ideal for devices issued to government personnel. The app tracks user locations every 4.5 minutes and interacts with non-government infrastructure.
Reactions on social media are mixed: Some Reddit posters say the White House has the right to put whatever it wants on government phones, while others say they are “fed up with constant surveillance” and call the mandatory installation of the app “pathetic.”
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