Not Trusted? Ted Cruz Mobile App ‘Cruz Crew’ Aggressively Siphoning User’s Personal Data

Cruz Crew mobile app data collection helps campaign read minds of voters

It is ironically interesting that Ted Cruz, a longtime proponent of protecting citizens from government intrusions into our personal lives, is running a mobile app in his campaign that is so intrusive that it accesses your contact list on your phone, looks at your photographs, and reads your text messages.

Protecting the privacy of law-abiding citizens from the government is a pillar of Ted Cruz’s Republican presidential candidacy, but his campaign is testing the limits of siphoning personal data from supporters.

His “Cruz Crew” mobile app is designed to gather detailed information from its users’ phones — tracking their physical movements and mining the names and contact information for friends who might want nothing to do with his campaign.

That information and more is then fed into a vast database containing details about nearly every adult in the United States to build psychological profiles that target individual voters with uncanny accuracy. Cruz’s sophisticated analytics operation was heralded as key to his victory in Iowa earlier this month — the first proof, his campaign said, that the system has the potential to power him to the nomination.

Cruz’s campaign combines the information with data from a group called Cambridge Analytica, which has been involved in his efforts since fall 2014. A Cambridge investor, Robert Mercer, has given more money than anyone else to outside groups supporting Cruz.

The scope of Ted Cruz’s system is formidable. Cambridge’s database combines government and commercial data sets such as voter rolls and lists of people who liked certain Facebook posts, along with consumer data from grocery chains and other clients that can provide a voter’s preferred brand of toothpaste or whether he clips coupons. In Iowa, where identifying evangelical voters was key to Cruz’s victory strategy, Cambridge’s employees scoured the Internet for such useful information as church membership rolls.

Cambridge CEO Alexander Nix said the company categorizes every American into one of five basic personality types derived from academic research and up to 50,000 questionnaires conducted each month.

“We’ve quantified the personalities of every adult American,” Nix said. “We can reach out and target those different clusters with messages about the things they care about most, but that have been nuanced to resonate with their personality type.”

For example, a Cruz campaign worker about to knock on the door of a house would access information about the household’s members through the Cruz Crew app, receiving prepared scripts about what issues each person was likely to care about, modified to appeal to their personality.

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