Geofencing Is Team Trump’s High-Tech Invasive Targeting of Swing State Catholics, Even in Church
February 16, 2020
By Bill Berkowitz
You are Catholic. You are attending Mass on a Sunday morning. You’ve turned your phone, which is carefully secured in your pocket, to quiet mode, so if it does ring, it won’t bother the other parishioners. Unbeknownst to you, your phone’s data is being mined. You are a victim of geofencing!
I never heard of geofencing until I read a piece in the National Catholic Reporter by Heidi Schlumpf, who wrote: “Political marketers are using cellphone data from churchgoers to target the GOP base, especially white Catholic and evangelicals in key states for the 2020 presidential election.”
“Politically-minded geofencers capture data from the cellphones of churchgoers, and then purchase ads targeting those devices,” Schlumpf reported. “That data can be matched against other easily obtained databases, including voter profiles, which give marketers identifying information such as names, addresses and voter registration status.”
Geofencing is nothing new. In a November 2017 story, Sarah K. White defined geofencing as “a location-based service in which an app or other software uses GPS, RFID, Wi-Fi or cellular data to trigger a pre-programmed action when a mobile device or RFID tag enters or exits a virtual boundary set up around a geographical location, known as a geofence.”
Depending on how a geofence is configured it can prompt mobile push notifications, trigger text messages or alerts, send targeted advertisements on social media, allow tracking on vehicle fleets, disable certain technology or deliver location-based marketing data.
Some geofences are set up to monitor activity in secure areas, allowing management to see alerts when anyone enters or leaves a specific area. Businesses can also use geofencing to monitor employees in the field, automate time cards and keep track of company property.
With the advent of the ubiquitous use of mobile devices, geofencing has become “a standard practice for plenty of businesses,” especially in retail and the hospitality sector, White pointed out.
“Geofencing can produce incredible results for marketers looking to roll out hyper-targeted, location-based marketing,” Amber Kemmis recently wrote, and she cited the following stats:
* Mobile ads with geofencing have double the click-through rate.
* Geofencing is compatible with 92% of smartphones.
* The average consumer spends 5 hours a day on their mobile device.
* 71% of consumers prefer a personalized ad experience.
* 3 out of 4 consumers complete an action after receiving a message when approaching a specific location
* 53% of shoppers visited a retailer after receiving a location-based message”
CatholicVote.org, a lobbying organization consumed by culture war issues -- abortion, gay marriage and what they call religious liberty -- are committed to using geofencing.
“We are already building the largest Catholic voter mobilization program ever. And no, that’s not an exaggeration,” CatholicVote president Brian Burch gushed in a November blog post. “Our plan spans at least 7 states (and growing), and includes millions of Catholic voters. We’ve already identified 199,241 Catholics in Wisconsin who’ve been to church at least 3 times in the last 90 days. So they are ‘active’ Catholics. The faith is obviously a priority for them — and most importantly, their conscience is active and the Holy Spirit is at work! But here’s the critically important thing we discovered. Over half of these people — 91,373 Mass-attending Catholics — are not even registered to vote!”
In 2016, according to Politico, Trump carried 52 percent of the Catholic vote, winning white Catholics by a 23-point margin. The president is surrounded by self-identified Catholics — including Attorney General William Barr, acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney and White House counsel Pat Cipollone — but rarely does he engage with outside Catholics in the same way he does with evangelical leaders,” Politico’s Gabby Orr recently reported.
“Catholics were of secondary importance to the Trump campaign in 2016, behind evangelicals. That hasn’t changed, but there is at least an effort to reach this community now,” said former GOP Rep. Tim Huelskamp of Kansas, now a senior political adviser for CatholicVote.org who attended the White House briefing for Catholics in December.
In a recent interview, Schlumpf told NPR’s Audie Cornish that “the idea of mining data of people while they're at worship in a church was causing outrage to some of our [National Catholic Reporter] readers. And the fact then that that data is going to be used for political purposes added to their problems with this.”
Geofencing is not illegal. But it is fraught with red flags as the potential for abuse is pretty clear. Sarah K. White noted that in 2017, “Massachusetts was one of the first states to enact a consumer protection law that objected to the use of location-based advertising. The attorney general blocked an ad campaign from Copley Advertising, which was hired by a Christian organization to set up a geofence around women’s health clinics that would target women in the waiting room or nearby with anti-abortion ads.”
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